The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has criticized governors for establishing state universities without the financial resources to properly fund them.
The President of ASUU, Emmanuel Osodeke stated this in an interview on Channels Television on Thursday, who disclosed that most governors duplicate universities in their states to get a piece of the pie from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund.
“Any governor today establishing a university is eyeing TETFund as a source of funding,” he claimed.
Osodeke said though TETFund is supposed to be an intervention fund for public universities, politicians and civil servants have been using the fund as a cash cow to be milked dry through shady procurement processes and contract fraud.
“TETFund was created as an intervention fund, not the major funding. The universities belong to the Federal Government and government is supposed to fund them and states are supposed to fund their own.
“It’s an intervention fund but there are people who wants to have access to that money from the political circle, from the bureaucratic circle, at all cost. We are struggling with that,” he said.
The ASUU president said a structure should be created to carry stakeholders along in the process of how the money is allocated and spent in an open and transparent manner.
He noted that “there should be stakeholders’ meeting to assess what you want to do with the funds.”
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Osodeke added that the stakeholders should include the university community; lecturers, student groups to put an end to the case.
He said, “You see today where somebody comes from the TETFund and say, ‘I have a project for you and I am going to be the contractor. We want an open project.”
“Every university council should be allowed to run their projects with the stakeholders involved.”
Osodeke further said ASUU is proud of fighting for the interest of the common man whose children won’t enjoy a university education but for the agitation of ASUU.
He said if not for the struggles of ASUU, there won’t be public universities in Nigeria any longer. “Any day we give up like others, our public universities will be gone,” he said.
He added that Federal Government officials are not interested in fixing the deplorable state of the tertiary education system in the country and not ready to grant the decade-old demands of ASUU.
Speaking on the meeting between ASUU members and Federal Government representatives on Wednesday, Osodeke said the meeting was the first official with the President Bola Tinubu administration.
He said ASUU discussed 2009 contentious issues with the Minister of Education, Prof Tahir Mamman, and his team in Abuja.
Some of the 10-point issues include negotiation of agreement, payment of withheld salaries, payment of withheld earned academic allowances and consequential adjustments, amongst others.
Osodeke said ASUU would meet with its members and a decision would be made in the next four weeks.
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