The Academic Staff Union of Universities has decried the massive deduction in the salaries of lecturers — supposedly engineered by the disputed Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS.

ASUU leader Abiodun Ogunyemi told Channels Thursday that many lecturers had lost between 50 to 70 percent of their salaries in the last eight months.

While faulting the Federal Government’s imposition of the IPPIS on universities, Mr. Ogunyemi lamented that some professors were meagerly paid N8,000 within the period.

A spokesman for the account-general’s office did not immediately return a request seeking comments Friday morning, but Mr. Ogunyemi appeared to be citing a glitch in the payment system, which IPPIS engineers have been working to address.

ASUU embarked on an indefinite strike late March over the non-payment of salaries and allowances of its members who have yet to enrol into the IPPIS.

President Muhammadu Buhari had directed that only federal workers captured by the platform would be remunerated.

Mr. Buhari explained that the platform was crucial to curbing fraud as well as halting salary payments to ghost workers.

ASUU, which has since developed its own payment software — University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS), insists that the IPPIS is best suited for civil servants and not university lecturers.

“The directive was meant for civil servants; university academics are not civil servants. We have an understanding with the government to develop an alternative platform that would be sensitive to the operations of the university and accommodate its peculiarities”, Mr. Ogunyemi told the News Agency of Nigeria.

“The platform we are developing will also respect the autonomy of our universities as obtained globally”, he added.

The union is expected to resume negotiations with the Federal Government next Wednesday, as the parties failed to reach an agreement for the second time this week.