300 institutions jostle for TETFund

Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Dr Abdullahi Baffa, has said private and public institutions have put pressure on the federal government to review the laws governing the fund to enable them to be listed among its beneficiaries. Baffa said extending its intervention to institutions outside the stipulated ones in the Act would […]

Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Dr Abdullahi Baffa, has said private and public institutions have put pressure on the federal government to review the laws governing the fund to enable them to be listed among its beneficiaries.

Baffa said extending its intervention to institutions outside the stipulated ones in the Act would amount to illegality, a statement from the fund said.

"When I said over 300 institutions are jostling to be included as beneficiaries, it was a conservative estimate. They are more than that. They include private universities, private polytechnics, private colleges of education, all monotechnics that are public, all research centres,” he said.

He said with 203 beneficiary institutions on the list, reviewing the TETFund Act 2011 to accommodate more institutions would dilute the impact and defeat the aim for the establishment the intervention agency.

He said the educational landscape has changed because of the concentration of intervention in the institutions enshrined in the Act and that in 2015 all universities in category A, were given N338m normal intervention out of which N100m was allocated for physical infrastructure.

"If we are able to give N300 million to every university, once we expand, maybe, we will be able to give 30 million to each university and this will go nowhere," he said.