From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), has stated that vendors and contractors are not involved in its academic and professional staff training interventions.
The explanation was, perhaps, in response to a report that it awarded N7.6 billion “questionable” contracts within two months, saying the Fund acted outside its mandate in carrying out capacity building programmes in its beneficiary institutions.
The Fund said the recent reforms in the Agency led to the elimination of the third parties, adding that contracts were no longer used for its content-based interventions except in infrastructural projects where the procurement of goods, tools, laboratory equipment and others, are needed.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, gave the explanation in an interview with newsmen on the sidelines of the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU), in Abuja.
He said: “We do not use contractors anymore. We have also eliminated the use of vendors in our serious academic and professional training. So, when detractors call it contracts, it’s because they are trying to criminalize it when they knew for example, that in contracts you cannot pay more than 30 per cent as advanced payments.”
He made reference to Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) recently reached with CAMPUS France which controls about 29 universities, led to slashing of the cost of tuition for Nigerian scholars by 20 per cent.
He said before now Nigerian institutions that were patronising other institutions were paying regular fees, but now it has been reduced by 20 per cent, adding that these MoUs were saving billions for Nigeria.
Echono added that in the case of Federation of African Research Association (FARA), in Brazil, Nigeria had 100 scholars and that the MoU was initially only on agriculture but he expanded it, and there are now 48 institutions involved instead of the initial 18, and all the scholars from Nigeria were now getting free tuition.
He said the Fund has received over 800 applications for the 150 spaces provided for Nigeria because it is cheaper to train with that.
“We, through this process of negotiation also in compliance with our own laws, are the ones that said, please, we can only give you 85 per cent because there is a requirement for us to show evidence of performance of monitoring before we release the final 15 per cent which is what we were able to negotiate.
“We have removed all these middlemen. People are not happy but I am sorry, that is the job I was asked to come and do. We have removed the wheeling and dealing and have been able to restore the image of our institutions, and we are proud of that achievement,” he said.
On the procurement of blackboards, the TETFund boss said the Fund had MoU with an American Company which made the purchase of the blackboards cheaper, adding that individual institutions keyed into the project and payed for the blackboards to eliminate cost.
“Rather than dealing with vendors who do not have capacity because these issues are intellectual property rights; there are also issues related to tuition. So, we don’t discuss contract when we’re talking about academic training and professional training.
“What is applicable are the fees, the tuition fees that people pay per student; and when you add all the costs for all these schools, you now get N7.6 billion. It sounds alarming, but the reality is that the vote for this for each school, each polytechnic and college of education is N25 million.
“We went straight rather than using their agents because the agents can only give you discounts on the commission they get from the owners of the copyright, but given the type of volume that we’re bringing, we gave all the leverage to be able to negotiate.
“And these are done by experts on our behalf who have been able to track record that do this and all the schools were in agreement,” he said.