If all govt agencies were like TetFund

Internationally, Nigerian graduates and teachers are suffering from the headache of playing catch-up. Today, graduates of Nigerian universities have to sit for fresh aptitude tests to qualify for anything on the international circuit. To the ordinary eye the ASUU strike, which has compounded our national worries, creates the impression that the sector is starved of […]

Internationally, Nigerian graduates and teachers are suffering from the headache of playing catch-up. Today, graduates of Nigerian universities have to sit for fresh aptitude tests to qualify for anything on the international circuit.
To the ordinary eye the ASUU strike, which has compounded our national worries, creates the impression that the sector is starved of funds. But facts on the ground speak to the contrary. ASUU insists that all promissory notes from the FG must be backed by hard cash, while FG says cash is on ground. So the people are at a loss as to who is right and who is not. But the squabble between ASUU and the FG which so far revolves around money would have amounted to nothing if all agencies of government functioned like the Tertiary Educa-tion Trust Fund, TetFund. Penultimate Saturday, precisely on November 23, I chaired an award night organised by the Independent Service Deli-very Monitoring Group, ISDMG, where the most conscious and hardworking agencies of government contested for laurels. In the contest were the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Federal Roads Main-tenance Agency, FERMA, and Teachers’ Registration Council (TRC), among others. They all show-cased their sweat in service delivery to the Nigerian people through a pragmatic and transparent selection process administered by the ISDMG.
The ISDMG is one of the foremost Civil Society Organisations in Nigeria that presents credible awards based on a proven methodology of convincing surveys in the country, says its Executive Director, Dr Chima Amadi. Its only regret is that many public institutions shy away from its awards either because of  their non-adherence to statutes, inability to meet their mandates or the lack of knowledge of how to add value to their patrons.
The awards are not restricted to agencies of the Federal Government alone. They are competed for by, for example, the Federal Road Safety Commission, its Rivers State equivalent, the likes of LASTMA in Lagos, the Nigerian Legal Aid Council and many others in that category who deliver invaluable services to the Nigerian people.
What these awards tell us is that some government agencies have simply lost their scripts. But there are those who vie for the laurels with all their efforts. TETFund is one of them. Last year alone TETFund disbursed a total of N300bn to tertiary institutions in the country, an amount that the chairman of the Funds Board of Trustees, Dr Babayo Musa, says was disbursed by the Trustees with the “absolute fear of God”. For that news, the public cheered.
TETFund won many of the major prizes in service delivery, and especially worthy of mention is that it lifted the grand prize the previous year.  This year it won many firsts, so much so that many observers of the education sector were compelled to describe that award night as TETFund’s night.
As an education inter-vention agency, TETFUND, which came into being in 1992, was established to merely provide significant palliatives to the real and tangible needs of tertiary institutions. But today it goes beyond that itinerary.  While it avoids areas such as fencing campuses, erecting gates and constructing car-parks, its presence is felt very strongly where it turns its attention because of the quality of services it provides and the choice of areas in which it intervenes. It is worth recalling however, that TETFund doesn’t own any of the institutions it finances and it painstakingly sticks to its mandate, which is to provide up-scale funding, not award contracts.  
What the chairman of the TETFund’s Board of Trustees probably left out of his speech is that the projects that are considered for this Funds’ disbursements are also chosen with an “absolute fear of God” too. According to Dr Babayo Musa, “first of all, TETFund ensures that submissions that institutions made to TETFund are prioritized. We do not agree to simply vet and approve whatever universities submit. We encourage them to prioritize their submissions in line with their core-mandates. Only after that is done are funds disbursed.”
If all government agencies were like the Fund we probably would not be experiencing such unnecessary and avoidable distractions like the ASUU strike. The former Health Minister, Prof Grange who was eased out of office in 2009 for an alleged misapplication of her ministry’s finances would have ended her service with pride, the shame and indignity that heralded the six Pension Directors who are being prosecuted for an alleged monumental scam in the sector would never have arisen and the country would have progressed alongside other developing countries of the world.
But what Nigerians are served by most of the agencies of government are excuses. That is why when I watched the TetFund shine at the ISDMG awards night, I wished that most agencies were like it. And I promptly asked its acting Executive Secretary Mallam Aliyu Na’iya what the secrets of TETFund’s successes were.  Everything, he said, lay in the major objective of the Fund, which basically revolved around ensuring transparency and accountability regarding all disbursements and expenditure, adding that TETFund had virtually broken down the barriers created by bureaucracy and red-tapeism in service delivery. And its chairman boasted that they would win more awards in the future.