How we’re transforming tertiary institutions in Nigeria – Baffa
Contrary to insinuations in certain quarters that Nigeria’s higher institutions are not getting any assistance on funding, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (Tetfund), has revealed how it intervened with billions of naira to change the narrative. The Executive Secretary of Tetfund, Dr. Abdullahi Bichi Baffa, in an exclusive interview with TONY AMOKEODO, MATHEW DADIYA, AUGUSTINE OKEZIE and FRANCESCA IWEMBE, explains that the agency has spent N120.5billion in the last one year to upgrade tertiary institutionsross the country.
In August you marked your one year in office, with the benefit of hindsight can you tell us what your achievements are in the past one year?
We thank God for sparing our lives to witness this one year anniversary. As the Executive Secretary of TETFUND, let me begin by appreciating the entire staff of the fund with whom we have been working day-in-day out to try to refocus TETFUND so that it can continue pursuing the achievement of its mandate as efficiently as possible.
I must say that the staff members have been putting in their best. Let me also appreciate the beneficiary institutions that have been cooperating with us trying deliberately to comply with our operational guidelines and working also very hard to support the pursuit of our mandate as a fund.
Of course, twelve months down in my tenure as Executive Secretary, I will say the major achievement that we boast of include the fact that for the first time in the history of the fund, we have given the biggest allocation ever to beneficiary institutions.
Since the establishment of TETFUND or going back to its days as ETF, never was any university given up to N1billion as normal intervention fund, never was any polytechnic given up to N691million as normal intervention fund, no college of education was given up to N679million as annual intervention, but we have succeeded in doing that.
The second thing that we are really happy with and which we count as our achievement, is that, we met unutilized allocation of about N175billion from 2011 to 2016 allocations meant for different institutions on different intervention lines for which they have either not drawn from or which they have started drawing but have not finished utilizing.
We have conducted what we call the ‘Access Clinic.’ For the very first time also in the history of the fund to be able to help beneficiary institutions to overcome whatever challenges that were impeding their ability to fully access and utilize these outstanding balances.
I am happy to say that arising from the conduct of the Access Clinic, substantial percentage of these un-utilized allocations have been cleared, because at the Access Clinic what we do is to listen to institutions, hear their challenges, advise them appropriately and agree on timeline within which they should overcome such challenges and drawdown the outstanding balances due to them.
We have also been ensuring that the institutions were complying with their strategic plans and their academic briefs as enshrined in the project that they are proposing. We have conducted what we called project proposal defense.
It is also the very first time in the history of the fund that we invited all institutions, and told them, we are giving you N1billion, tell us what you intend to deploy this N1billion for?
We listen to their presentations and ensure that all the projects that they are proposing were guided by their strategic plans according to their master plan and in accordance to their priorities and they are also not in violation of our mandate.
This, we are very happy with because we have succeeded in ensuring that any project that was proposed by any institution that is outside our mandate area have been excluded from any consideration.
Any institution that is proposing structures that are small, tiny structures, small cubicles and any institution that is not aware of what sort of document to prepare and to submit, we have also drawn their attention.
These exercises that we have conducted were not only designed to help the institutions, but help ourselves so that we can improve on our own efficiency and our own performance.
I must also say that we were able to end the culture of impunity in the manner in which the Act establishing Tetfund was obeyed.
We were able to ensure that every infringement that was going on in the past have been stopped and that is why for example, institutions that have abandoned projects and where contractors collected money and walked away without doing the project, we are able to get them back.
We traced scholars who have collected money to go for Ph.D. training or Masters training, and failed to go, we recovered such money.
All these major and minor infringements that were going on, we identified them and we have gone after their perpetrators and we were able to commence their recovery or compel the contractors back to site.
But one thing that we are very happy with, during these last 12 months, is that everyone out there is now in full knowledge that the TETFUND of today is not the TETFUND of yesterday because our guiding principle is the Act establishing fund.
Whatever we are doing, we ensure that we are guided by the provisions of the Act and the operational guideline of TETFUND.
I am also happy to say that internally, we have improved on the professional training that we offer to our staff to make them better equipped to handle the activities that we are doing.
One very clear achievement that we are proud to announce is our ability to increase the human capacity development intervention.
In 2015, each university was given N100million, polytechnic: N70million and colleges of education: N60million, all for the purposes of academic staff training and development.
In 2016 when I came, we have tripled that amount; we have given each university N300million as against the N100million given to them.
We have given polytechnics N200million as against N70million given to them in the previous years and we have also given colleges of education N200million as against the N60million given to them.
This total of N44billion is meant to train scholars to pursue Master’s and Ph.D. from all over the world.
This is in consonance with the President Muhammadu Buhari administration’s agenda of pursuing with vigor human capital development and this we are doing believing that training our scholars in the best universities across the world is the surest way of ensuring that our tertiary education institutions here at home were being managed properly and our students are being taught by the best-trained academics.
I will also like to say that we have succeeded in continuing with all the projects that we inherited and we have also started numerous other ones arising from the intervention allocation that we have given.
Suffice to say that counting numbers or listing number of projects handled y the fund is almost impossible. But suffice to say that one only need to walk into any campus of our beneficiary institutions and would see the signature of TETFUND all over.
What we are very proud of is that our support for scholars to pursue higher degrees, attend academic conferences at home and abroad, support scholars for institution based research grant so that they can conduct research, support to scholars for academic monitoring development, have been increasing day in day out.
Let me also say that we have refocused our library development intervention to ensure that our tertiary education institutions are having state-of-the-art library, well furnished and well stocked with the appropriate holdings and that is why we introduced the requirement that any submission by any beneficiary institution in respect of library development, must include what we call collection development policy.
A collection development policy for a library is a necessary requirement for development of library and we have introduced this as a new innovation to ensure that all procurements for the purposes of library were guided by the needs of the institution, needs of the scholars of the institution and the needs of the students of the institution.
Nothing would show those need other than the collection development policy which is updated from time to time.
If you spent N44billion on human capital development, then how much have you spent on infrastructure intervention in the tertiary institution in the last one year?
We have spent N76.5billion.
In 2015, there was this allegation that N300million was missing from the account, what effort have you made to recover this money?
Well, certain amount of money, about N273billion was borrowed by the then Federal Government under the leadership of President Goodluck Jonathan from the fund.
We have taken steps to report that money to the President. N10billion out of this money was lent to a sister parastatals (PPPR) and then the remaining was used by the Federal Government.
We have already gotten the approval of His Excellency the President of Nigeria directly from the debt management to scrutinize that loan and that the payment plan is put in place, we are pursuing that and we are going to recover that.
What the then President Jonathan did with the money they borrowed, we at TETFUND do not know.
When you assumed office, you did say, this is a new Sheriff in town how are you going to handle some of the recalcitrant?
It is very easy to handle them because in every system there are recalcitrant people. In organisation like ours, we have such recalcitrants at two levels, from the beneficiary institutions and from within the fund.
In every system, there is a constitution. In organisation like ours, we have self infringement, the consequence at two levels from the beneficiary institution and from within the Fund.
I want to say that from within the Fund when we are working with a team of professionals that really love their job all that is needed for them is the right leadership.
We are working hard to provide that right leadership for them and I can say even there were people who were resistant in the past, but we don’t have them now as it stands.
Everyone has adjusted, everyone is now working diligently yet we have some minor establishing issues which we are now getting used to handling.
Among our beneficiary institutions, yes we have such cases by staff or the management of the institution demanding for compromises, but this is not very rampant.
For example, you will see that a project that is supposed to be completed in 10months since 2011 and now this is 2017 it has not been completed.
There are also cases where institutions are lacking contractors and where institutions that have collected money and aid contractors but the contractor didn’t deliver.
We have involved law enforcement agency and get these contractors to complete the projects within agreed timeline.
We have no business with the contractors in the first time; our business is with the beneficiary institutions who we gave money so it’s them that we are going to send the law enforcement agency to.
So before we go to that extent, we have to do the needful and I am happy to say that we have quite a number of them with the EFCC, with the DSS, and with the police.
Quiet a number of contractors have rushed back to site to continue with the projects. In the Content Base Intervention Centre where we give scholars money to attend conferences abroad or at home, we give scholars money to go for Ph.D, masters, we give scholars money to conduct research.
In some of these cases, they collect the money and they refused using the money for such purpose, we have identified them, we are writing to the beneficiary institutions asking that they compel those parties to return the fund and we are happy to say that in some institutions, defaulters have started making some impact.
We have also made it clear that any scholar, who is given N24million or N27million to go to the UK for studies and refused to go, should either return the money or go to jail.
Any scholar who is given money to conduct a research and does not conduct the research should return the money or we send the law enforcement after you.
The same thing with conference attendance, but I must emphasise that this is not a rampart occurrence.
There are a few isolated cases but one is too bad for us, we don’t want any such incidence, we want anybody that collects money for a particular exercise should use that money for that purpose.
So these are part of the infringements that you see here and there but we are on top of them. Most of them occurred in the past and we are optimistic that they are not going to take place now.
I am happy to say that some of these infringements took place because of information gap. We are conducting for the first time also what we call Arrests.
we are attending to chains of professionals to all the 202 beneficiary institutions so that they interact with management, academic board, senate, unions to raise the awareness of our stakeholders in beneficiary institutions about what we do, how we do what we do, the guidelines that indicates what we do so that we will be on the same page.
Beneficiary institutions and every stakeholder should know what our guidelines are, let them know what we do and how we do it, let them know our expectations and make enquiry on them so that when they are making submissions, they know what to include, they know when to make submission.
When we have disbursed money to them, they know when to make use of the money and they know what will constitute an infringement for which we will compel them to refund etc.
We have gone to North Central states, six states and Abuja. Next week we are going to another geopolitical zone and each week we go to one zone and we will not leave the geopolitical zone until we finish with the entire beneficiary institutions.
Are the private higher institutions also part of the beneficiary institutions?
The beneficiary institutions are all public universities, public polytechnics, and public colleges of education. By public we mean that if a university is owned by the Federal, State or Local government.
Our Act mandates us to support them in the area of essential infrastructure for teaching, in the area of instructional material and equipment, in the area of research and public teaching and in the area of academic staff training and development.
TETFUND have been doing very well to the standard of education delivery in our country. We can raise the quality and we can make our high education institution globally competitive.
There were some stakeholders who raised allegation that you have some interventions agenda but that you concentrated on two areas; infrastructure and manpower of the higher institutions. Can you put more light on these allegations?
Why these allegations are being made is because people only look at the tangible, the tangibles are the infrastructures that are being fixed.
But people will not go into the laboratories and see the equipment that we have placed there, people will not go and find out how many scholars have we supported to attend academic conferences, how many scholars we have supported to conduct researches.
How many scholars we have supported to convert their manuscript into books, how many journals are we supporting across the country to be published on monthly, bi-monthly, bi-annually, how many projects are we maintaining, how many tools and equipment have we supported for their publication.
Let me summarise these things; the four mandate areas: for the 1st and 2nd mandate areas that is supporting beneficiary institutions for the teaching allowance, we have four intervention lines; The 1st intervention line is program upgrade, TETFUND maintenance, which means that any equipment that is dilapidating, we refurbish it.
There is equipment publication and the fourth one is Entrepreneurship intervention. This is about empowering the students so that they can become creative and self-reliant.
Equipment Fabrication is training student to fabricate equipment, TETFUND maintenance is setting standard equipment for them to be upgraded for research and publication mandate.
We have seven interventions and they are; Library development fund to equip our libraries with books, online and hard copy, electronic and hard copy and also other library tools. That is the first intervention tools.
We also have the institution based research tool to conduct research based intervention; we also have the academic development based intervention.
This intervention is geared at supporting scholars who have written manuscripts but don’t have the means to convert them into books.
We also have ICT support intervention. By this we are looking at supporting beneficiary institutions with information technology and access.
In the world today, all institutions must be in the cyber net and we are supporting these institutions to have quality and dynamic website. We are also using that intervention to train our staff both teaching and non teaching.
We believe that no staff will perform effectively in our tertiary institution in their expected role if they are not computer literate. That is why we created this intervention so that any staff who is not ICT literate could be made ICT literate.
Those that are literate could be made ICT proficient, those that are proficient could be made ICT confidence, but the ICT training is continuous, there are rooms to continue to improve and we want all staff in our tertiary institution to be ICT competent and that is why we created this.
The other intervention is what we call International Research Fund. This is an intervention that is open to all scholars that have the capacity to conduct cutting edge research geared towards addressing some of the fundamental national challenges and that is why we allocate between 3-50million naira for a given proposal to conduct research.
We also have academic research Journal. Scholars have written journals but there is not enough outlet to publish and we want the Nigerian scholars to be publishing the result of their research and that is why we are supporting beneficiary institutions with academic research journal intervention so that they can draw support used in publishing journals.
We also have Higher Education Book Development Fund. Higher Education Book Development Stand is also national, targeted at harvesting the Ph.D, the Master level of Nigerian scholars from the Nigerian institution and converting them to National level.
To set other class known script written by senior scholars that is being converted into tertiary level books. This level intervention line is just to support research, Academic staff training and development.
We have three other intervention lines. These three intervention lines are firstly TETFUND Scholarship. This is the one where we support scholars to go abroad or stay at home for Masters and Ph.D.
We also have the conference attendance which is intended to support scholars to attend academic conferences at home and abroad, the objective which is to give them the opportunity to go and interact with their peers, their seniors, people play in their discipline so that they can exchange knowledge.
They can also broaden their knowledge, they can do collaboration and they strengthen their capacity to come and do better job, train their students better when they return and the ACT guiding the teaching practical support.
The Teaching Practical Support is only given to colleges of education and colleges of education primary aim is to train educational professional teachers and one of their challenges is that for these trainees teachers to be professionals, they have to conduct teaching practice and for this teaching practice to be adequate, this thing must be supervised.
The lecturers that are going to supervise them, the money to support them were not there and we introduced the intervention support so that teaching practice will be supervised properly. These are the 14 intervention lines that our attention is on.
What are your challenges now?
There is no establishment without challenges. But one of the challenges we have here is information gap. In other to break the information gap, that is why we are out there in the field, going from institution to institution to take TETFUND to them.
We are taking TETFUND to institutions so that we can reach out to wherever information is needed.
I read a publication that says that the new Executive Secretary is trying to stop academic scholarship in the institution which is impossible to accept.
I ask this question; I came and met an allocation of N100 million for each university, I made it N300million, N70million for polytechnics, I made it N200million, N60million for colleges of education, I made it N200million and I don’t want scholars to benefit?
I came and met local scholarship for Ph.D at N1.5million for five days and N1.3million for 10 days for one year, I made it N4.5million for five days, N3.6million for 10 days and I don’t want them to benefit?
I came and met that if you are going to study abroad, there are limits beyond which you will not be given the money, I removed the pay, do I not want people to benefit?
So the information that I do not want people to benefit from TETFUND scholarship is a lie.
What I did was to triple the allocation to increase the intervention and to also make it more decent, because it is more decent that a scholar that is doing Ph.D. in Nigeria will be given N1.5million while a scholar studying in Nigeria will be given N750, 000 for one or two years as against half of that which was being given.
If the new Executive Secretary does not want people to benefit, how could he be increasing these allocations?
People that are laying the allegations are those that have defaulted our guidelines for which we have asked them to return the money because, they collected our scholarship and didn’t go for the study, and we will ask for refund.
People that were sent to UK to study and we found out that they were in Kenya; we ask them to refund the money.
People that have collected our money to go for Ph.D. and we discovered they are doing their masters, we ask them to refund the money because our guideline says that once approval is granted, you cannot change country, you cannot change institution, you cannot change program.
So what we are doing is that once you violate our guideline, we will write to your institution because this scholar is breaching the condition of the scholarship and so these are the people that are spreading all sorts of rumour.
If asking someone who committed infringement to return money is what is being translated to as ‘I don’t want people to benefit’, then in our place, we don’t want people that are problem, we will not want them to perpetrate trouble.
Do you intend to blacklist those defaulting contractors?
Yes, we have started blacklisting the contractors. We also have some contractors who their projects collapsed in about three institutions, one in University of Port Harcourt, one in Polytechnic Oko, and in Kano.
Never are we going to allow these contractors to handle TETFUND again. We also have contractors who abandoned projects since 2010, 2011, we are going to get the report and report them to BPP so that the Public Procurement will be in the know.
They have infringed and therefore are not allowed to handle TETFUND project anywhere in Nigeria.
Are you getting support from the Anti-graft agencies?
I think we will have to express our very sincere appreciation to the law enforcement agencies, the Nigerian Police, the Department of State Security, the ICPP, and the EFCC. They are ever ready to co-operate with us.
We are enjoying corporate amount of support from them. We are also co-operating with them because there are certain allegations that are going on independent of what we are doing but they needed some information from us.
I think we are working in a very harmonious relationship.
How much support have you received from the Federal Government to have achieved this much?
It’s the duty of Mr. President and since it was a directive from us, obviously, you should take it directly that we are enjoying maximum co-operation from the President of the country, the Minister of Education and the entire government.
What we have put in place is to ensure that our journey to the top on the ranking of our higher education is accelerated.
For example, if all our scholars are going to just any university to be paid, then getting our university to climb on the ladder will be difficult, but we think all our scholars should top up the lead in the best university in the world.
If we are trained in the best university, when you come back to Nigeria wherever you are working you will teach the institution like the institution that you have been trained.
The sub-culture of the institution where you have been trained is what you are going to carry forward to your work place.
The way you are going to conduct yourself generally is going to be guided by the conduct that you have learned from on top of the lead institution.
And there you will be trained by the best scholar, you’re going to be interacting with the best student and that is why we are saying that you go to the top of the lead university so that you can enjoy TETFUND Scholarship.
We are doing this because we want our universities to also be on top of the lead because if we are training our staff there, we are also insisting that our scholars as part of the feedback that we should get when we give you research grant, you must publish a sound Journal.
The only benefit that Nigerians enjoy arising from sending money for you to attend conference, spending money for you to conduct research, is for you to publish a quality journal and that is why some universities in the world publishes only certain kinds of journals.
For you to benefit with TETFUND Intervention in research, you need to be able to publish a resounding, quality journal. We are happy that it is the result that we produce now that we will enjoy in the future.
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Since the establishment of TETFUND or going back to its days as ETF, never was any university given up to N1billion as normal intervention fund, never was any polytechnic given up to N691million as normal intervention fund, no college of education was given up to N679million as annual intervention, but we have succeeded in doing that.
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I came and met that if you are going to study abroad, there are limits beyond which you will not be given the money, I removed the pay, do I not want people to benefit? So the information that I do not want people to benefit from TETFUND scholarship is a lie. What I did was to triple the allocation to increase the intervention and to also make it more decent, because it is more decent that a scholar that is doing Ph.D. in Nigeria will be given N1.5million while a scholar studying in Nigeria will be given N750, 000 for one or two years as against half of that which was being given.
