TETFund Refutes Claims Of Bias In Presidential Bailout Disbursement To Scholars

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has issued a firm rebuttal to recent allegations that it has deliberately omitted group of Nigerian lecturers studying under the sponsorship of the TETFund Scholarship for Academic Staff (TSAS) programme from the bailout approved by President Bola Tinubu.

The Fund, in a press statement signed by the Drector, Public Affairs, Abdulmumin Oniyangi, asserted that the claims of bias were unfounded.

It specifically noted that the case of one Kamal Adewole Saka, a lecturer at Federal University, Oye Ekiti, who was awarded a TETFund scholarship for Ph.D. in Psychology at Girne American University, Cyprus, to the tune of N27,573,350.00 and has lately been in the media wrongly accusing staff of the Fund of “embezzling his N10 million scholarship grant” when, in actual sense, his full tuition had since been paid directly to the institution since November 3, 2022.

“Although the Fund had reported expending over N3.8 billion as bailout to about 1,500 stranded Nigerian scholars studying abroad under the TSAS programme to cushion the effect of the current exchange rate in compliance with Mr. President’s directive, it has become imperative to give detailed background and steps taken generally by the Fund and to specifically address the disinformation being peddled by Kamal Adewole Saka.”

The Fund also noted that scholars were affected by the exchange rate fluctuations due to non-operation of a domiciliary account by their home institutions, which left them indebted on their programme.