TETFUND budgets N213b for public institutions
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) has announced a budgetary allocation of the sum of N213.4 billion as 2016 intervention budget for the year 2017 intervention activities.
Executive Secretary of the fund, Dr. Abdullahi Bichi Baffa, who made the disclosure while addressing a press briefing in his office, said each of the 40 federal universities and 34 state universities will receive the sum of N1 billion only and that the 54 public polytechnics are to receive the sum of N691.6 million while each of the 55 public colleges of education will receive the sum of N679 million
Baffa, who described this year’s budget as unprecedented, said “this is the biggest ever annual direct disbursement (normal intervention) given to any beneficiary institution since the establishment of the Fund.”
While maintaining that the 2016 allocation to beneficiary institutions is almost three times the allocation given to them in 2015, he added a major highlight on the individual intervention lines shows that the Fund’s determination to accelerate the training and support for scholars in Nigeria’s tertiary education institutions to pursue and acquire doctorate degrees; accelerate the process of bridging the teaching and learning infrastructure gap in all beneficiary institutions; and continue to support cutting edge research and innovation.
A major area of concern which received serious attention in the budget was on how to address the backlog of underutilized allocations as part of the internal control mechanism of the Fund. One of such measures, he maintained, include the prevention of institutions from accessing a given intervention line until the previous year’s intervention is accessed, utilized and properly retired.
He lamented that the majority of beneficiary institutions have backlog allocations from the previous year’s underutilized (unaccessed funds), saying the fund is establishing an Access Clinic that will interact with beneficiary institutions that are facing backlog challenges with a view to seeing how they can be assisted.
