TETFund decries poor information on intervention

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), has identified inadequate information as one of the factors hindering access to intervention funds by tertiary education scholars for academic programmes. Executive Secretary of the Fund, Dr. Abdulahi Baffa, who stated this at the weekend at a one-day awareness held in Abuja, decried widespread violations of guidelines by some staff of public institutions after accessing funds. “There is what we now call in TETFund the tyranny of desk officers.

TETFund desk officers in many institutions are responsible for the lack of information. Communication will come, but they will throw it into their drawer. “Although those information are addressed to head of the institution, they only call a few of their friends, some will only deal with staff to compromise the process and refused to notify even the head of the institution”, he disclosed.

Baffa also disclosed that some staff, under academic staff development programme, failed to undertake postgraduate studies in designated institutions after collecting money for the same purpose, saying: “Our realisation is that in most of these content-based interventions, you find people collecting the money, but refuse to go for the studies. 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 allocations”. Earlier, the Provost of the host college, Dr. Mohammed Gambo, noted that it was the first time any Executive Secretary of the Fund was visiting the college, noting that participants at the workshop were members of the academic board, chairmen of the college’s unions, heads of departments, deans of schools and principal officers of the college.

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