Arc. Sunny Echono
2022 intervention: TETFund breaks down intervention to tertiary institutions
By Uji Abdullahi Iliyasu
Abuja
The Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) Sunday Echono, has hinted on the amount of intervention tertiary institutions will benefit by this year. He said each university will get the sum of N642,848,138.00; Ploytechnics N396,780,086.00; while Colleges of Education get N447,758,804.00 each as contained in the approved 2022 interventions for beneficiary institutions across the country.
Echono, who stated this at the strategic interactive session for heads of TETFund beneficiary institutions in Abuja, said the letters of allocation for the annual direct intervention would be released to them at the meeting, while the allocations for special interventions will be released appropriately in due course.
“Management has further decided to remove the need to obtain internal audit clearance on submissions to access 2nd tranche payment, where there is a final tranche outstanding. Henceforth internal audit clearance will only be required before payment of final tranche,” Echono said.
He said the decision is to eliminate bottlenecks and delays in the execution of the intervention projects, adding that another area of serious concern to the Fund, is the incidence of distressed or non-performing projects which is becoming rampant and disturbing.
He hiinted that the Fund has about seven nonperforming/distressed projects in University of Port Harcourt; six in Enugu State University; five in University of Nigeria, Nsukka; four in Taraba State University; and University of Calabar; four in Kaduna State University and one at Alvan Ikoku College of Education.
“This phenomenon becomes even more worrisome, when viewed alongside the problem of unaccessed funds. We are mindful of the intricate variables in project management and delivery as well as the constraints created by our own internal policies and are ensuring that we review our processes where required but will also demand from beneficiary institutions accountability and sanctions where needed.”
The Tetfund boss said he would be engaging beneficiary institutions who have those serious problems with the view to bringing the projects to speedy completion.
He said in line with TETFund’s drive to deepen Research and Development, the fund has introduced the train the trainer capacity building of academics on research proposal writing and research grant management skills, which is expected to have trained a total of 1,761 academics by July 2022.
“It is believed that those that have gained the training will now begin to train other academics locally and as such the programme will be stepped down in Year 2022 and 2023 before close-out.”