The Federal Government has come out to say that the continuous closure of Nigerian Universities amid the ASUU strike has contributed to the ongoing #EndSWATNow protests across the country.

The Minister for Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige revealed this at a recent meeting with the leadership of ASUU over the union’s stiff opposition to the IPPIS payment platform.

According to him, the reports that FG is thinking about replacing the IPPIS platform with University Transparency Account System (UTAS), the platform that the university teachers have come up with against IPPIS, are very wrong.

He added that ASUU and FG will try to meet each other halfway so that the students can get back to school as soon as possible.

His words, “For the past one week, we have all been on our toes, we have been meeting and we pray that this meeting will yield some good fruits. We don’t take very great pleasure, to the fact that the children who are supposed to be in school are being recruited into the #EndSARS, #EndStrike, #EndSWAT and all the kind of situations.

“As much as possible, we will try to see how we can meet ourselves halfway, so that we can resolve this crisis to the benefits of all and the country at large.”

“We have had the preliminary report and testrun on the UTAS, which is the University Transparency Accountability Solution. We believe that with that, we will be able to get it right.

“Let me make it clear to members of the press, we never said UTAS will replace IPPIS as some of you are reporting, No! The UTAS developed by them is for the University systems and they feel that it captures the peculiarities that are configured to accommodate all the peculiarities of the University systems especially as it affects the Professors and other teaching staff, and even the Non-Academic Staff. That is the situation.

“We, as government feel we are going to put it up for tests – three stages of test. We have done the first stage of test which is within the timeline of six months that ASUU promised. We are going to do other integrity test, Alpha test, Beta test and the one they call roll-over and other whatever test. It is the technologists that know all those tests. But this is the round we are going on now.”