The Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund has announced reforms to discontinue reliance on vendors and contracts in its academic and professional staff training programs.
Contracts are now excluded from content-based interventions, except for infrastructural projects requiring procurement of goods, tools, laboratory equipment, and related items.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, stated this during an interview with newsmen on the sidelines of the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities in Abuja.
Echono’s response follows accusations from an online publication claiming that TETFund granted N7.6 billion in dubious contracts within two months. He stated that the fund had overstepped its mandate by conducting capacity-building programs in its beneficiary institutions
But the TETFund boss took time to explain that the Fund has been leveraging on Memoranda of Understanding to carry out its academic and professional staff training since 2016.
“We do not use contracts, we have eliminated the use of vendors; we do serious academic and professional training.
“We sponsor people for postdoc, for bench work, or even academic degrees: masters and PhDs, and for professionals’ proficiencies and certification in ICT that will improve employability.
He said that one of the MoUs reached recently with CAMPUS France, which controls about 29 universities slashed the cost of tuition for Nigerian scholars by 20 per cent.
He said before now Nigerian institutions that were patronising other institutions were paying regular fees, but now it has been reduced by 20 percent, adding that these MoUs were saving billions for Nigeria.
Echono added that in the case of the Federation of African Research Association, FARA, in Brazil, Nigeria had 100 scholars and that the MoU was initially only on agriculture; but he inherited and expanded it, and there are now 48 institutions involved instead of the initial 18 and all the scholars from Nigeria were now getting free tuition.
He said the fund has received over 800 applications for the 150 spaces provided for Nigeria because it is cheaper to train with that.
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“We through this process of negotiation also in compliance with our own laws, are the ones that said please we can only give you 85% because there is a requirement for us to show evidence of performance of monitoring before we release the final 15%, which is what we were able to negotiate.
“We have removed all these middlemen; people are not happy but I am sorry, that is the job I was asked to come and do; we have removed the wheeling and dealing and have been able to restore the image of our institutions, and we are proud of that achievement,” he said.
