This letter proposes a joint pilot and payload power allocation (JPA) scheme to mitigate the error propagation problem for uplink multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access systems. A base station equipped with a maximum ratio combining and successive interference cancellation (MRC-SIC) receiver is adopted for multiuser detection. The average signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (ASINR) of each user during the MRC-SIC decoding is analyzed by taking into account the error propagation due to the channel estimation error. Furthermore, the JPA design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem to maximize the minimum weighted ASINR and is solved optimally with geometric programming. Simulation results confirm the developed performance analysis and show that our proposed scheme can effectively alleviate the error propagation of MRC-SIC and enhance the detection performance, especially for users with moderate energy budgets.