TETFund Executive Secretary decries poor use of intervention fund by institutions

The Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Suleiman Bogoro has decried that institutions are not utilising intervention funds they are given for infrastructural and content development, while some others who do, end up with poorly executed projects.

The ES while describing the trend as worrying recalled that late 2019, the Fund retrieved over N10 billion intervention funds that were not utilised by institutions. He said some institutions had received funds for close to 9 years but do not utilise.

Bogoro, who said this when the House Committe on Tertiary and education services led by its chairman Aminu Suleiman paid an oversight visit to the fund on Tuesday in abuja, informed that as a move to curb the trend, the Fund will set up a committee to carryout oversight visits to all beneficiary institutions that will monitor and ensure proper use of intervention funds.

Bogoro further disclosed that the fund will henceforth invest massively on research and less of physical infrastructure so as to improve the ratings and rankings of Nigerian universities and to deepen the relevant areas that deepen competitiveness of Nigerian institutions.

“We cannot continue to emphasise teaching at the expense of research , that’s the area we are investing in massively. For too long, TETFund have  been associated mainly with buildings, we want a paradigm shift, not to suggest that we will stop providing physical infrastructure, we need them.

“We introduced post doctoral support for the purposes of undertaking post doctoral research as well as benchwork. We are hoping that the approval of TETFund centre of excellence, we believe that if we deepen intervention in the right areas in research, manuscript development, ICT, Journals production , conference attendance, that will be the right way to proceed,” he said.

The ES explained that Institution Based Research (IBR) has a ceiling of N2 million per research grant, which can only address basic research. He said currently, each institution is entitled to N10 million for IBR, while the  National Research Fund (NRF) has a ceiling of up to N50 per grant.

He recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved  N5bn for NRF and the fund is seeking approval of 15 Million for IBR.

He also informed that 128 research grants have been approved for NRF.