Reps Panel Decries Inability Of State Tertiary Institutions To Access TETFUND Interventions

The House of Representatives Committee on Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) has expressed displeasure with the inability of state owned institutions to access agency’s interventions.

The committee also queried the Executive Secretary of TETFUND, Sonny Echono, over the slow process of accessing funds by tertiary institutions in the country.

Chairman of the committee, Hon. Miriam Onuoha, raised these issues when she led members of panel on an oversight visit to the agency at its headquarters in Abuja.

According to her, the committee frowned at such a situation where funds meant for tertiary institutions were not accessed by those it was meant for.

“Why do we have a preponderance of assessing funds by most of these institutions,” Onuoha asked.
She urged state governors to use their instrumentality of office to ensure that heads of institutions comply with TETFUND on accessed funds.

Speaking on the purpose of the oversight, Onuoha said it was meant to see how the agency had performed in the 2022-2023 budget, in line with its budgetary provision.
She noted that in line with the function of the committee, the panel must ensure that allocations made to TETFUND were used judiciously.

The TETFUND Executive Secretary, Echono, thanked the committee for intervening in the payment of education tax by summoning commercial banks’ executives. He said there had been a rise in education tax collection from 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent which had to do with the efficiency of collection.

Echono said the collection from education tax in 2020 was N257billion and by 2021, the fund received a sharp decline in the tax collection of N185.5 billion, adding that the collection rose to 328.8 billion in 2022 and also 725 billion in 2023 respectively.

He noted that before now, Nigeria was not doing well in the area of research grants but efforts had been made as the country currently moved from 9th position to 7th position in African research grants.
Echono lamented that the high exchange rate had reduced the number of scholars the fund trained in its interventions, saying remittances to scholars in the past were not too good.