By Gift Samuel, The Sight News
Abuja-In a bid to raise transparency to a higher level, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has launched its Monthly Digest to keep Nigerians abreast of its activities.
Speaking on Thursday at the Public Presentation of the maiden edition of the Monthly Digest, the Executive Secretary TETFund, Dr. Abdullahi Baffa said that the move is a way to make the Fund’s activities clear and available to the community of stakeholders and the general public.
“The monthly digest is produced and published with the sole aim of enlightening all stakeholders and the public by providing information on the core activities of the Fund on a monthly basis.
“Each day officers of the fund are in the field engaging in project monitoring and evaluation, monitoring scholarship, conference attended, monitoring research activities.
“We believe that our activities should be known to every body not just the Fund and the institutions, there will be a record of all the approval in principle given to beneficiary institutions as well as monitoring visits conducted in a given month” he said.
He further noted that the Digest is to be more transparent and will help to send the information to tax payers on what the education tax is being used for as the benefactors will be listed.
He added that the Digest which has 11 contributing editors drawn from the 11 departments in the Fund, will be used to report the activities of Tetfund in each time of the year, as officers are in the field working.
Also speaking, the President, Academic Staff Union Of Universities (ASUU) Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi announced that the gains of TETFund are the loses of ASUU, saying that more should be expected from the ES who he termed ‘a restless worker’.
He however kicked against TETFund being the principal pillar of support for projects in campuses, noting that the Fund should be an intervention agency not the primary source of funding capital development of tertiary institutions
While stressing that transparency is paramount in ASUU, he said that the Union has always suspected TETFund’s activities but the digest will serve as a instrument to monitor, track and attack tetfund.
On the issue of involvement, he said “Good tertiary education institutions must be participatory in nature and I believe that the publication will give basis to make strong cases for bottom top approach”.
Earlier in his goodwill message, the Head of Rectors of Polytechnics, Alhaji Masud Elelu conveyed the happiness of the Polytechnic sector as he expressed hopes that other innovations will come from Tetfund as quickly as possible.
He further urged TETFund to ensure that subsequent edition will call for news items from various institutions
The TETFund Monthly Digest which is a publication of the Office of the Executive Secretary contains General guidelines for accessing intervention Funds,status of fund disbursement to beneficiary institutions, summary of fund disbursement, projects evaluated as well as others.
