Accessing TETFund, UBEC’s billions – New Telegraph

That palpable rot, especially as it concerns infrastructural and facility deficiency, cutting across primary, secondary school level and higher institutions of learning in the country, is lamentable is not surprising.
The nagging issue is that despite the appalling state of the nation’s schools, there has been absolute little effort on the part of some of the school administrators, on one hand, and essentially government at the state level, to rescue the system from imminent collapse.
In more concrete terms, this situation is reinforced by some systemic lapses and failure of managers of these tertiary institutions to frontally address the issue despite the provisions put in place by the Federal Government to tackle the infrastructural deficit and other needs of the schools.
It is, therefore, unbelievable to explain the rationale behind provisions made for physical development and human capacity building of the institutions by Federal Government through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) and the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), but most of the institutions are incapacitated to draw from the pool of funds.
It is worrisome to hear that 25 per cent of the N1 trillion allocated to institutions of higher learning – universities, polytechnics and colleges of education – in the past five years by TETFund, is yet to be accessed by the affected institutions.
The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Dr. Abdulahi Baffa, who made this known recently in Abuja, would probably have wondered why this was so, given the dearth of facilities in the institutions when only about N85 billion had just been accessed in the last nine months out of about N170 billion earlier allocated to some tertiary institutions.
More depressing is that only 181 institutions, comprising 74 universities, 50 polytechnics and 57 colleges of education were able to defend their proposals for accessing the 2016 allocations, leaving behind several other institutions, which were yet to clear their backlog of accumulated but un-accessed funds lying fallow in the vault of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
As lamentable as this might be, it is absolutely disgusting to hear that so much money is being unutilised when the benefiting institutions are crying of insufficient funds and resources to carry out research, staff training and execute infrastructural development.
Most damning is the gross inability and failure of many governors to pay their states’ counterpart funds to access their funds with UBEC. Almost all the state governments are defaulting.
That a whopping N60 billion meant to tackle the deficiencies in primary education is also lying fallow in the vault of CBN, according to the Executive Secretary of UBEC, Dr. Hamid Bobboyi, is a demonstration of a failed system and incompetence. It is an indictment on the part of the managers of the institutions and the governors.
It is really unfortunate for state governments to have consistently failed to access the intervention fund simply on account of inability to pay their counterpart funding when schools are in a shambles.
Like the TETFund for higher institutions, UBEC funds are annual grants by the Federal Government to help tertiary institutions, as well as states to upgrade their facilities in order to provide a solid education for the students.
To access the funds, state governments are required to match the Federal Government’s grant strictly for primary education expenditure, while in the case of TETFund, the institutions, as part of the conditions, should be able to properly retire the previous year’s allocation to access new one.
It is depressing that virtually all the states have ignored these funds even as students study under very deplorable conditions, including having lessons under trees and dilapidated classrooms.
What is then the big deal in accessing these free funds, if the defaulting vice-chancellors, rectors and provosts, as well as the state governments are not deficient in running these institutions?
The federal government should take exception to this lacklustre attitude on the part of managers of these institutions, and sanction them appropriately, as their actions suggest that they are incompetent to run the institutions, and so should be booted out of the system.
Of course, if the direction the nation’s education is presently drifting as a result of the dearth of infrastructure and facilities, especially in the higher institutions of learning due to sloth, loathsomeness and incompetence of some school administrators be allowed to continue, the country will pay dearly for such laxity and failure to act appropriately.
The present lethargy and lack of political will on the part of government and other policy makers to act on this salient matter, and to rejig the system, is detrimental to the health of the sector.
Consequent upon this, if not all, most tertiary institutions in the country today are howling over one challenge or the other, ranging from shortage of facilities, decayed infrastructure to dilapidated structures, lack of capacity development programme, while funds are lying fallow somewhere.