The Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, has said part of the reforms it carried out was to eliminate the use of vendors and contracts in its academic and professional staff training interventions.
The Fund said 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, Arc Sonny Echono, stated this during 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.
Echono was reacting to the allegations by an online publication that TETFund awarded N7.6 billion questionable contracts within two months and that the Fund acted outside its mandate in carrying out capacity building programmes in its beneficiary institutions.
But the TETFund boss explained that the Fund has been leveraging on Memoranda of Understanding, MoUs, to carry out its academic and professional staff training since 2016.
“We do not use contracts, we have eliminated the use of vendors; we do serious academic and professional training.
“We sponsor people for postdoc, for bench work, or even academic degrees: masters and PhDs, and for professionals proficiencies and certification in ICT that will improve employability.
“So when detractors try to say things like these, they’re calling it contracts, because they are trying to criminalise when they knew for example, that contracts you cannot pay more than 30 percent as advanced payments,” he said.
He said in one of the MoUs reached recently with CAMPUS France, which controls about 29 universities slashed 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 percent, 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 inherited and 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 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, he said the Fund had MoU with an American company which made the purchase of the boards cheaper, adding that individual institutions keyed into the project and payed for the boards to eliminate cost.