ASUU: FG Says Union Yet To Meet Demand On UTAS

The Federal Government on Wednesday relayed that it was still awaiting the report of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) on the Universities Transparency Accountability Solution (UTAS).

UTAS was said to have failed the integrity test for its lack of a data centre.

The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa revealed this while answering questions asked by the State House reporters after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at the Council Chambers, Presidential Villa, Abuja.

One reason for the ongoing ASUU strike is the FG's refusal of UTAS as the payment platform against the Integrated Personnel and Payment Information System (IPPIS).

While the FG said UTAS has failed the integrity test for its acceptance as a payment platform, ASUU disclosed that the government has refused to accept the new platform. 

Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami, when asked about UTAS said having received a letter from Minister of Labor and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige who asked for a review of the technical capacity of the software of the platform, he sent the request to NITDA.

"They (NITDA) conducted their own analysis, their own testing and sent same back to me, and I drafted a cover letter I forwarded to the Minister of Labour and Employment and I copied the two Ministers of Education, Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, and also the office of the Accountant General of the Federation and even National University Commission (NUC)", Isa said.

When asked to clarify the stand of UTAS, NITDA DG, Inuwa said: “When we received the request to review, UTAS, you know, building complex system like UTAS that involves employees’ personal data, and also payment system, we have to subject it to do best practice tests before approving.

"Normally, when we are reviewing that kind of system, we perform three tests.

"Firstly, you need to get the business requirement. What do you want to achieve? So it’s not the technology that will come first, it is the business requirement, what do you want to achieve, then you need to identify the capabilities you need to achieve that is your business objective.

“Part of the capability is the technology you need to bring in and the people that will operate the technology before you start thinking of the technology because technology is always a tool that will help you to achieve an objective or to do your work.

"If you bring the tool before knowing what to do with it, it will be useless.

NITDA DG, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi

“So when they came, we said okay, fine. We will do a user acceptance test, ASUU you’ve built this system, but you are not the one that will use the system.

"There are people in Bursary and all the finance that will use this system. So we need to do a user acceptance test with them, let them come show them the system, let them see if it can help them to do the work there.

“Secondly, we said we’ll do vulnerability test to test the security integrity of the system. Because if there is vulnerability, people can hack it, can change and it involves financial transactions.

"Adding zero means a lot. So we say we need to do that.

"And also we need to do a stress test. You can build a system on your laptop or on a small computer, use it but when you put so much data it will crash, we need to do the stress test to make sure that the system can do. This is on the system.

"Then also you need to have a data center where you need to put that system because just having a system without the data center it will not operate also.

“So we did all these three tests with them. And the system couldn’t pass. We wrote the reports and submitted them back to the Honorable Minister, which he forwarded to all relevant institutions, including ASUU.

"As we speak now, ASUU is working, trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system and we will review it again, but that is just one half of the story.

“The second half of the story also, we need to find where to put that system like IPPIS we have a data center built for it. ASUU where are we going to put it?

"That means we need to have the data center and also that data center, we need to check to make sure it meets the minimum requirement.

"Because if you put people’s information and the system crashes, how can you pay them salary?

“You need to build redundancy. There are a lot of things to do. So but as we speak, they’re trying to fix all the issues we highlighted with the system.

"Then when we finish that, we need to look at the second half of the story, getting where to install it.”