By Ahmad Danyaro and Farid Bello
A few months ago precisely on August 1, 2016, President Muhammadu Buhari appointed 16 heads of parastatals and agencies among which is former chairman of ASUU Bayero University Kano, Dr Abdullahi Bichi Baffa, as Executive Secretary of TETFUND. Bichi was found competent and worthy to drive the change agenda of the PMB administration in tertiary institutions.
When Dr Baffa took over as the chief executive of TETFUND on August 8, 2016, he outlined the policy thrust of his administration and set radical reforms in tone with PMB administration change agenda on education.
He promised to ensure that TETFund will work assiduously towards the realization of President Buhari’s dream of improving the standard of higher education in the country, especially returning Nigerian universities to a global competitive standard from the onset he left no one in doubt as to what he is was up to. His agenda was clearly to clean the mess he met and end an era mostly characterized by negligence and abuse of processes at the tertiary education fund.
Armed with a master plan formulated by demands and need of stakeholders, Dr. Baffa pledged to return the Fund to its original mandate warned managers of public tertiary institutions and contractors executing TETFund sponsored projects to sit up. “We are going to ensure that we monitor, we are going to continue to monitor very professionally the execution and implementation of projects so that the objectives that are set forth are achieved efficiently and smoothly.
“Let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind that we are not going to tolerate anybody playing with public funds in any of our client institutions. Let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind that we are not going to tolerate any contractor refusing to deliver according to specifications, let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind that we are not going to tolerate any of our Inspectors and Monitors that will come and manufacture reports, cook evaluation and submit. We are going to be matching what is on the paper with what is on ground”
After just seven months in office ,Dr Baffa Bichi, whose tenure as ASUU’s strong man witnessed series of strikes for neglect of infrastructure , has made significant progress in fulfilling his inaugural speech and has brought sweeping changes in returning TETFUND to its core mandate of providing essential infrastructure for teaching and learning, instructional materials and equipment, research and publication, academic staff training and development and any other need which is found worthy in opinion of the board of trustees, is critical and essential for improvement of quality and maintenance of the standards in the higher educational institutions .
The achievements are evident with the approval of the Tertiary Trust Fund (TETFund), 2016 intervention budget of N213.4billion, the highest ever to be distributed to the tertiary schools.
The executive secretary of TETFund, giving a breakdown of the budget said each of the 40 federal universities and 34 state universities will receive the sum of N1.94billion. Baffa added that each of the 54 public polytechnics would get N691 million while each of the 55 colleges of education will receive N679 million. He said this was the biggest ever annual disbursement given to any beneficiary institution since the establishment of TETFund.
The executive secretary said that in a bid to ensure that institutions were manned by scholars that have terminal degrees the fund had placed a high premium for them to have scholarships to study for higher degrees. That is why academic staff training and development is allocated N300 million for universities and N200 million each for polytechnics and colleges of education respectively. Baffa added that the fund will ensure it monitored the allocation disbursed to each institution to ensure the fund was judiciously utilised.
On the new focus of TETFund under his leadership, the executive secretary pointed out that there are adjustments needed to achieve maximum result, especially with the guidelines for release of funds to beneficiaries. Other areas of intervention being adjusted include Education Support Services, Academic Staff Training and Development, Conference Attendance and Programme Upgrade for beneficiary institutions.
“We are trying to refocus the agency back to its original primary mandate; back to the five core mandates that we are pursuing and for which adjustments are being made in some of our guidelines and regulations here and there with the sole intention of ensuring that we are getting maximum result. We want to ensure we are making maximum impact and that we are getting value for money in whatever we are spending”.
In only 7 months of coming into office, Dr Baffa has demonstrated in words and actions his commitment to restore TETFUND to the path of development and ultimately took back Nigerians higher institutions to global competitive standard.
With his performance in less than a year in a delicate and demanding agency, Dr Baffa is charting a new course for the organization .Though some stakeholders resistant to radical reforms may find this technocrat uncompromising but there is a general consensus that TETFUND has a vision, mission and commitment to improve Nigerian economy through various interventions for improving quality of education in the giant of Africa.
Danyaro and Bello write from Kano
