NANS Constitutes Committee to Probe TETFund Intervention in Varsities, Others …Urges FG to raise education tax to 5%

 

The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) has set up a committee to investigate allegations of misappropriation of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETfund) intervention fund by some universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.

The student body has also called on the federal government to increase the Education Tax, payable by private companies in Nigeria, from the current 2 per cent to 5 per cent.

Addressing journalists in Abuja at the weekend, NANS President, Danielson Akpan, lamented that the education sector, over the years, has been on the decline because of corruption in the system.

He disclosed that the committee would visit the beneficiary institutions on verification of projects awarded by TETfund between 2009 till date.

Akpan said this was with a view to ascertaining the existence of such projects and to also discover institutions that are in the habit of diverting TETfund interventions or executing substandard projects.

He added that this ‘criminal diversion of funds’ has led to execution of shoddy projects, and in some cases, outright abandonment, saying such substandard and abandoned projects dot tertiary institutions across the country.

The student leader said: "The state of infrastructures on our campuses is nothing to write home about.

"Efforts by successive governments to address this obvious decline has met with sabotage by many of the academic managers whose responsibility it is to ensure the development of our citadels of learning.

"Today, the world refers to our tertiary institutions as glorified secondary schools. This is no longer acceptable, hence the need to do the needful."

Akpan noted Tertiary Education Trust Fund was set up by the Federal government to address some of the infrastructural challenges in the tertiary education sub-sector.

"Sadly, however, it has come to our knowledge that many beneficiaries of the agency have overtime sabotaged the interventions against the very projects they applied to undertake," he said.

He said it has now come to a point that “the students must come open to save the education sector and members from the continuous poor and lack of essential facilities on our campuses.”

Meanwhile, the students lauded President Muhammadu Buhari for approving N208 billion 2019 TETFund intervention fund for public tertiary institutions in Nigeria.

NANS President, however, said: "We do not want these funds to go the way others have been mismanaged, misappropriated or embezzled.

"We use this medium to sound a note of warning to our school administrators (managements of tertiary institutions) that NANS will no longer accept any form of mismanagement and underdevelopment in our tertiary institutions."