Some teachers recruited into Unity Colleges in 2018 will start receiving their salaries by end of the month, the Federal Government has said.
The government blamed the delay on migration to the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) to forestall illegal employment at the time.
Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Sonny Echono, made this on Monday after monitoring the ongoing West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) at Federal Government Girls College Bwari and Government Girls Secondary School Dutse, Abuja.
Echono, who said he has been concerned with the plight of the affected teachers, said: “It is a very unfortunate incident that keeps me awake at night because there is a comedy of error but the reality is that there was a cause for it.
“Cases of illegal employment were discovered but the people you are talking about are legitimate officers who are properly employed and documented but unfortunately there was a huge spike and when this was noticed, an embargo was placed on migrating them to IPPIS
“This coincided with when they were ready to be migrated to IPPIS and it took a very long time to resolve all the issues because it is a huge network operating within the ministries, civil service commission until the chairman himself, the Head of Service and many of us involved in the system decided to beam on it and resolve the problems.
“But the embargo has since been lifted for them , many of them who have been invited have done the needful, the assurances I have is that by the end of September or October they will begin to receive their salaries.”
Echono, who commended the peaceful conduct of this years examination, further noted that over 1.57 million candidates registered for the WASSCE in over 19,000 examination centres nationwide.
Stressing the ministry’s zero tolerance for examination malpractices, he maintained that any individual or school found culpable of malpractice would be arrested and punished in order to ensure sanctity and immunity was restored to the nation’s education sector.
“Beside the disruptions we had on September 13th in south east where some of our candidates were stopped from doing the exams, it is a peaceful and stressful examination.
“We do not have challenges this year in terms of preparing the students aside the COVID-19. We have situations in some states that had to close schools down but we made alternative arrangements especially exit classes to take this examinations, so we are satisfied with the arrangements.”
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