The Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (Tetfund), Dr. Abdullahi Baffa, recently made a shocking revelation that a high-level fraud involving some scholars and staff of his agency had been detected. Baffa said the staff had abused the intervention funds by pretending to be pursuing higher studies or attending conferences at home or abroad, collected relevant scholarships, but failed to attend such training events.
He exposed this fraud when executive members of the Senior Staff Union of Colleges of Education in Nigeria (SSUCOEN) paid a courtesy visit to his office. Baffa was quoted as saying: “A situation where some scholars and other staff engaged in the abuse of intervention processes by not adhering to guidelines stipulated by the Fund must stop.”
Tetfund was established as an intervention agency under the Tetfund Act 2011. It is charged with the responsibility for managing, disbursing and monitoring the education tax to public tertiary institutions in Nigeria. To enable the Tetfund achieve the above objectives, the Act imposes a two per cent Education Tax on assessable profit of all registered companies in Nigeria, while the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) is empowered by the Act to assess and collect the Education Tax.
In turn, the Fund administers the tax and disburses them to tertiary educational institutions at federal and state levels. It also monitors projects executed. The mandate of the Fund, as provided in Section 7(1) (a) to (e) of the Tetfund Act, 2011, is to use the fund for the provision and maintenance of essential physical infrastructure for teaching and learning; instructional material and equipment; research and publication; academic staff training and development and “any other need which, in the opinion of the board of trustees, is critical and essential for the improvement of quality and maintenance of standards in the higher educational institutions.”
It is, indeed, mindboggling that intellectuals and staff of the agency, who should live by example, are involved in this kind of fraud and abuse of privilege. It is equally disingenuous that while hundreds of companies, who are operating in a difficult business environment, cough out billions of naira in taxes as a sign of respect for the laws of the land to support learning and scholarship, they are directly or indirectly being short-changed by those who are supposed to benefit from the intervention.
Obviously, this unfortunate development has concomitant effects on the quality of education in our system. Besides direct funding by the Federal Government, Tetfund alone had, in 2016, spent over N120.5billion on Nigeria’s 203 higher institutions. Dr. Baffa, who took over the affairs of the Tetfund in August 2016, said the agency, under his watch, had tripled the amount of allocation made available to the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
He specifically said as part of the efforts to enhance teaching standard and research work, Tetfund under him spent N44billion on human capital development for academic staff trained across top universities in the world. Therefore, while we commend the Tetfund boss for coming out with the revelation, he should go beyond drawing a line to stop the fraud by ensuring that all those who collected monies under the guise of going for trainings and conferences are arrested, prosecuted and forced to bring back what was given to them.
This is, indeed, not a time for lamentation. It is time for action. Many universities and some polytechnics have embarked on strike action on the grounds that they are being underfunded for both research and infrastructure. It is, therefore, an irony that those who received similar scholarship awards decided to misappropriate them. They should be made to refund the money.
