Governors are creating public universities they cannot sponsor according to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
Emmanuel Osodeke, who is the president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) stayed this in a Channels Television interview on Thursday.
The president of ASUU claimed that in order for governors to receive funding from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), they sometimes duplicate universities in their states.
“Any governor today establishing a university is eyeing TETFund as a source of funding,” he stated.
Even though the TETFund is meant to support public universities through intervention, according to Osodeke, politicians and government employees have been using it as a cash cow to be milked dry through dubious contract fraud and procurement practices.
“TETFund was created as an intervention fund, not the major funding. The universities belong to the Federal Government and government is supposed to fund them and states are supposed to fund their own.
It’s an intervention fund but there are people who wants to have access to that money from the political circle, from the bureaucratic circle, at all cost. We are struggling with that.”
According to the ASUU president, a framework should be set in place to include all relevant parties in the process of allocating and using funds in an open and transparent manner.
There should be stakeholders’ meeting to assess what you want to do with the funds,” he stated.
In order to resolve the case, Osodeke continued, the parties involved should include the university community, instructors, and student organizations.
“You see today where somebody comes from the TETFund and say, ‘I have a project for you and I am going to be the contractor. We want an open project.
Every university council should be allowed to run their projects with the stakeholders involved.”
Osodeke further said that ASUU is proud of standing out for the interests of the average person, whose children won’t benefit from a university education because to ASUU agitation.
He said, “If not for the struggles of ASUU, there won’t be public universities in Nigeria any longer. “Any day we give up like others, our public universities will be gone.”
He continued by saying that representatives of the federal government are not ready to meet ASUU’s terms, which have been in place for ten years, and are not interested in improving the nation’s appalling postsecondary education system.
He stated that in 2009, ASUU met in Abuja with Prof. Tahir Mamman, the Minister of Education, and his staff to discuss sensitive topics.
The 10-point difficulties involve, among other things, agreement negotiation, payment of salary withheld, payment of earned academic allowances withheld, and consequential modifications.
ASUU would meet with its members, according to Osodeke, and a decision would be made within the following four weeks.
Recall that the TETFund was established as an intervention organization to offer public tertiary institutions additional funding in the form of infrastructure renovation, among other.
The Fund’s primary source of funding is the 2% education tax that is deducted from the assessable profit of businesses with Nigerian registrations.
However, the organization is mired in accusations of contract fraud and embezzlement, and a number of stakeholders are demanding openness in the contract awarding process.
