TETFund wants institutions to address violations in staff-related interventions  

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has urged the 202 public tertiary institutions under its mandate to address infractions in their content-based interventions committed by some benefiting academic and non-academic members of staff.

In a statement yesterday, the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Dr. Abdulahi Baffa, stated this while addressing participants at a one-day awareness workshop at FCT College of Education, Zuba.

He decried widespread violations to its guidelines by some members of staff of public universities, polytechnics and colleges of education after accessing funds.

Baffa said TETFund had come to realise that some scholars under its academic members of staff development programme failed to undertake postgraduate academic studies in designated institutions abroad after collecting monies for the same purpose.

He said: “Our realisation is that in most of these content-based interventions, you find problems of scholars given money to go and study abroad or even at home, refusing to go but collecting the money and staying at home.

“Those members of staff given money to attend conferences, refusing to go, money coming for teaching practice and unions coming to flock the office of the provost or the bursar insisting that this is welfare and it must be shared without doing the supervision.”

According to him, there are lots of infringements arising from lack of information about the guidelines and regulations governing the operations of these interventions and utilisation of accompanied allocations.

Baffa also condemned what he called “the tyranny of TETFund desk officers” over their failure to properly communicate with beneficiaries of various interventions but choose to compromise the process.

Meanwhile, the executive secretary disclosed that TETFund had created ICT support intervention to increase the visibility of all beneficiary institutions in the cyber space as quite a number of institutions in the country do not have websites, adding that even where they have, they are static, unchanging and difficult to go through.

“We want to support beneficiary institutions to have state-of-the-art, dynamic, user-friendly, very informative websites as well as using the bulk of the money to train members of staff to become ICT literate,” he said.