The Chairman of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), Dr Babayo Musa, has asked chief executives of tertiary institutions to comply strictly with ethics and regulations of procurement or risk continued cut off from the huge intervention funds mapped out for institutions.
Dr Babayo said large volumes of yet to be accessed tertiary education funds running into billions of naira are domiciled with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as a result of institutions’ failure to adhere to the ethics and due process for access to allocated funds.
“The funds are not accessed because we want to be sure they are used judiciously. If the requirements are not met,we can’t release funds no matter the pressure”, he said, adding that his agency was interested in monitoring every of the projects that the funds are used for in order to prevent qualitative corruption which might even be more dangerous than quantitative corruption.
The TETFUND boss said additional funds, being proceeds from 2013, will be disbursed in two weeks and tertiary institutions must meet requisite standards to access them.
Dr Babayo made this disclosure during the public presentation of the report of the National Conference on Transparency, Accountability and Ethical Values in Tertiary Institutions for Sustainable Growth.
The report deals extensively with corruption in tertiary institutions, challenges in management and funding and also ethics and compliance in public procurement, non adherence to which have resulted to about 65 billion naira of yet to be accessed funds left in the coffers of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund as at May 2014.
Channels Television’s Omelogo Nnadi reports that the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission has had numerous petitions coming in from students, staff, unions and other players in tertiary institutions causing it to conduct a university study system review. Hopefully this will pave way to correcting corrupt-prone processes and salvaging the country’s tertiary education sector.