Professor Suleiman Bogoro is the Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund). In this interview with ONYEDI OJIABOR, INNOCENT DURU and FRANK IKPEFAN, Bogoro told the story of how the tertiary education interventionist agency is working to reposition tertiary education in the country.
What does TETFUND stand for in relation to tertiary education in the country considering the mandate of the fund?
The history of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) predates the mandate because the mandate is an outcome of the history of the emergence of Education Tax Fund (ETF) that is now TETFund.
I always like to remind people; we talk of a number of intervention agencies in Nigeria but we say TETFund is unique for many reasons.
It is not just a creation of government, it is a fusion of ideas emanating actually from the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the early 90s. We were on strike and we (ASUU) were banned by the government in 1988.
We resurrected in 1990 and went into negotiation with government for two years. In 1992, we signed an agreement with government on what we called non-budgetary funding window for tertiary education in Nigeria.
Because we realised that the traditional budgetary mechanism had invariably failed the nation in addressing the key challenge, which is financial commitment for the funding and sustainability of tertiary institutions.
I still remember that time when ASUU said our universities were glorified secondary schools. That what you saw in a university campus was decrepitude instead of elegance and that it was unacceptable to continue that way.
When we go round the world, we see fantastic infrastructure and we ask ourselves, is it the same Nigeria that,for nearly two decades, our universities were comparable to the best any where in the world.
Professors came to Nigerian universities for sabbatical from the top league universities-the Ivy League. Call it, any of them, they will come and they were happy because there was standard. Suddenly, things started going so bad and it had to do largely with the funding mechanism.
That was why ASUU said no, let us get an alternative non-budgetary funding window. The negotiation, like I said, went up to 1992, I think about two years or there about. We signed an agreement in 1992 for the emergence of ETF; ETF was the original name.
Later it was changed because of the law of 1998 because it came into being in 1993. The agreement signed in 1992 came into been in 1993. Between 1993 to 1998, it was ETF.
It became Education Trust Fund in 1998 through the amendment of the original law and as you are aware, the monies were collected but were not applied until 1998-1999.
I still remember with the emergence of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, he put up the first Board of Trustees. The late Olakunrin chaired the board. She was the first person to chair the Board of Trustees of TETFund and from 1999, effectively up to 2010, as it were, about 11 years, the funds were applied but you will discover that the money was used for anything and everything in the education sector.
No wonder it was not impactful enough because invariably, areas that should not benefit – based on the original concept, that it should be tertiary sub-sector and only public because the private was clearly excluded. At the time we were negotiating, I am not sure there were more than three private universities at the time. So it was the public universities that were considered at that time.
ASUU anticipated that there will be a case for private universities – but said no it is for public and thank God that how many years after, today, the number of universities, private and public, are about the same but in terms of population, you will see the difference.
The private universities that are about the same number with the public have only less than six percent of the population.
The public universities have 94.5 per cent of the student population. That tells you clearly that government was right to emphasize the public that has the majority.
Historically, any government wants to intervene in areas where it impacts on the largest number of people and so there is justification numerically as it were, statistically and even then government wants to emphasize, besides the largest number, they are happier when it is the category of people that are less privileged and the majority based on the statistics and facts are more in the public institutions.
Many of the private universities they are charging actually in dollars and some local people out there, who are selling small things on the streets may not have seen the dollar.
I am sure the message is very clear. That is how this thing continued. When the basic sub-sector was benefiting from 1999 to 2010, it was discovered that, that was the wrong application of the funds.
We had to refocus and that is when a case was made and government agreed and changed the name from ETF to TETFund. It was not just the name, it also changed the focus.
In other words, instead of allowing the basic sub-sector to benefit, primary and secondary schools were benefitting.
If you go there today, many of the public primary and secondary schools, you will see ETF projects there, until 2011 when the law was changed and now refocused to only public tertiary institutions and the law was even more specific-only universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
So monotechnics are not supposed to benefit. Research institutes are not supposed to benefit. Colleges of agriculture, colleges of nursing and even the law schools that benefitted were all removed.
And you will notice that from 2011, definitely and manifestly, there has been more impact by way of presence of new infrastructure, which was the major reason that the negotiation started in the first place. You saw more of them from 2011 in our public tertiary institutions.
We just returned two days ago from Edo, Delta, Anambra and Imo states. We commissioned projects in nine institutions.
From Delta State University in Abraka to Ambrose Ali University in Ekpoma to the University of Benin, and Edo State Polytechnic, Usen, then to Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi -Ukwu then Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Anambra.
We came back very late in the night to Owerri to commission infrastructure in three institutions- Uwangu Polytechnic, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, and finally Imo State University. I can tell you – I am quoting the heads of institutions themselves saying ‘if you took away TETFund, we don’t know what our institutions will be.’ That is an opinion that resonates across Nigeria. It is a statement of fact. 
That is why TETFund is not just a success story in the context of addressing a worrisome problem of funding as it were in our educational institutions.
How does TETFund access funds for its projects?
Today, TETFund has become more of a model because the law of TETFund actually protects the Fund from the vagaries of bureaucratic interference, including for instance, that our laws stipulate that our budget does not go to the National Assembly.
It goes to Mr. President having been initiated by management to the board of trustees that recommends it subsequently to the president through the minister of education. It is supposed to protect the Fund and a number of procedures that we have adopted have helped in making sure that there are lesser leakages.
I can say this without mentioning the name of any other agency because we are not competing to say if other agencies were named intervention agencies in this country that have had funds, massive funds, you will agree with us that any person will be right to say that TETFund is a success story.
No wonder other African countries are coming to understudy the law and the funding mechanism and the management mechanism that has made TETFund a success.
We are proud to say this. We are not saying we are perfect; even within us, without anybody criticising, for making an observation, we have engaged in self- correction of our own selves. As I am talking to you, we have put up an impact assessment committee made up of one per cent of external persons.
TETFund staff are only guiding them to get the correct information but it is led and managed by external persons, experts that know what their calling is as professionals in impact assessment and we are hoping that by the time their report comes out, we would have known these things. That is about the history.
So you’re beating your chest to say that TETFund is on course in terms of discharging its mandate?
As far as I am concerned, the indices are clear. Let me give one example. In 2015, when we started intervention on the content component, in respect of academic staff training, 2009 to 2010 before the name of ETF moved to TETFund, Nigerian universities with lecturers with PhDs were only 40 per cent.
That was not good. You cannot be competitive when only 40 per cent of your lecturers have PhDs.
That was bad enough. By 2015, the percentage had moved to 60. As I am talking to you, we are waiting from the latest figures from NUC. We are confident that the percentage is anything not less than 75 per cent and if we are moving to 80 per cent, I think that is progress.
That is an index of impact and performance in the context of improving the capacity of the teachers who facilitate the impartation of knowledge to students and mentees- MSc and PhD candidates. When we go round commissioning, the heads of institutions say it themselves that you can see the impact of our projects.
How do the institutions access intervention funds from TETFund and the condi tions that should be met for them to qualify?
We have guidelines. We have nearly 15 intervention lines. There are a number of intervention lines that I have not even mentioned besides that of buildings. And the buildings are many – classrooms, lecture halls, offices, laboratories and libraries.
Recently, we said that we will not commission an infrastructure that is not equipped again. We had done that in the past because we thought, let us have the buildings first. And I think we have reasonable numbers of good buildings now. We should not be commissioning infrastructure that are not equipped or furnished.
That is a firm decision we took recently and I remember when I commissioned an infrastructure recently, we were about going in and they said they were waiting for the equipment to come and I told them this was the last time I will do this. I was very firm because it is not good for us. We want to see the equipment there.
If it is engineering and we just build offices for lecturers, give them air-conditioners, then you go to the workshop, no engineering equipment but a beautiful building. It doesn’t make sense. Does it? We are changing all of that. Other intervention lines, like I mentioned, include academic staff training and development which I have justified with indices and even statistics. In polytechnics, we have what we call fabrication intervention.
You know polytechnics deal with metals and wood infrastructure for their trainings as technologists. Fabrication is an important area that will demonstrate that they are getting products out of their training and research and we have an intervention line.
All polytechnics get that annually for fabrication. It has helped a number of innovative products from the polytechnics.
For colleges of education, we support teaching practice. We also made available micro teaching lab equipment. That’s what they call it in the colleges of education and they are professionally desirable for colleges of education. We have provided all of that and for universities, we have entrepreneurship.
We have entrepreneurship fund and we are deliberately encouraging it particularly at this time that we feel we must make knowledge to be relevant in respect of the product that we dish out every year. Let our graduates be job creators not only employability, which is a higher threshold than just being employable. But in many cases, embarrassingly, many are not even employable, very sadly, I am sorry to say. We cannot continue that way.
The other intervention line I have mentioned one after the other. We are genuinely reviewing each academic staff conference attendance and even non-academic staff conference attendance. But more of the funds go to academic staff. You are supposed to go and present a paper on either international or local conference. The idea of going overseas is to learn and share knowledge with other academics from other climes and share what we have.
There are things that you do but take for granted. Go and see how others do it there. Their own methodology may be slightly different. Who knows, either you or them may be getting results that are more justifiable and scientifically you can evaluate that and make a case. So conference attendance is very important. Manuscript development is also important.
I have not mentioned it all along. It is a key intervention area. We support textbook production by lecturers and we also support the transformation of PhD thesis to textbooks.
We support the conversion of some of the best PhD thesis, not just anyone to textbooks depending on the discipline. Some of the disciplines are a little bit difficult to turn them into textbooks but for some it is very possible. We have many that have been turned into textbooks and the technical advisory committee that we inaugurated recently is moving very fast. These are the areas.
There is also journals, which is another area of intervention by TETFund. You just communicate the outcome of research through journals. We have gone far on that and there has been quite commendable progress.
For the first time, we supported professional journals that had gone down. Most professional journals that had gone down have been revived, courtesy of TETFund. It may be mechanical pathology for instance, anthropology, criminology, journals of artificial intelligence, artificial dissemination- call it, any discipline out there, ICT, architects, and society of engineers and so forth. We have supported them and they have been revived and they are happy.
We did that and then went to institutions-based journals. Many of them faculty-based journals and some an assemblage of experts across various disciplines in the universities but it is institution-based journals. We have supported them.
We want to continue doing that. These are some of the areas we believe that we have done the much we can based on the expectations of Nigerians and to improve the ranking of Nigerian universities.
A committee was set up to review the impact of interventions carried out by TETFund between 1999 till date. How far has the committee gone with the assignment?
We had hoped that by now, the committee would have turned in its report. Like I said earlier, my happiness is that we have succeeded in putting up an independent committee, independent in every sense of it.
The leadership and the composition are exclusively made up of independent persons. They are nominating and engaging while some of the personnel of TETFund is to assist them with particular information that they need in detail whether it is finance, project, monitoring and evaluation, strategic planning, ICT, call it; any of those relevant departments here. So far so good, as I am talking to you, they are out there in the field and we are hoping in two weeks time they will round off.
They started with a sample prototype questionnaire. They tested them, verified them and they have now gone out finally. We are hoping within two weeks they should round off.
We are hoping within one to two months in the new year we should get their report and we have another committee that will review and get us a final clean document before we go to printers before we get out these documents and finally announce to Nigerians that we have an impact assessment document that tells the story of TETFund from 1999 to 2019.
It is our own way of opening up ourselves for scrutiny and we told them to tell us where we have done well. We also told them to be fair to us and they should also be frank to us on areas we have not done well or where we need to improve on.
You will agree with me that this is a thing that is very rare in the public service. And to our credit, we have taken the bull by the horns to do that. It is a rare thing in Nigeria but we are confident that the report will guide us to improve on whatever that we have been doing that we think there are commendations or appreciation.
We can improve on them. Where we have weaknesses, we will be happy to be reflective, go back and be guided by the suggestions. Because if they criticise, I imagine, naturally of course, there will be recommendations. We have criticised this area that should have been done like this. We believe there are experiences in Nigeria and beyond Nigeria that it can be done better.
TETFund disburses funds for the infrastructure but excluded from the award of contract. Does it add up that you provide funds without knowing how the contracts are awarded?
No, not without knowing. We do know how they are because we are supervisors. We are the custodian of the funds by law. The monies are made available to us by our law.
The Federal Inland Revenue Service collects and sends to the Central Bank of Nigeria and remits into our intervention account. And every year, Mr. President approves and money is released to us to implement those projects. It is our responsibility to supervise but we are not supposed to be handling the projects directly. It is the institutions and it makes it easier.
In TETFund, as I am talking to you now, our staff strength is less than 500. That is to tell you that there is no huge bureaucracy in anticipation of our handling of projects directly. And we are happy with that. Let the institutions handle it but then I can assure you that we are officially mandated to supervise and release the funds. We cannot release it and turn the other face.
We have to make sure. We will release it and monitor it. That is why we have monitoring and evaluation department as well as project department. They advise us. We liaise with the regulatory agencies – NUC for universities, NBTE for polytechnics and NCCE for colleges of education. They liaise with the institutions and advise us.
They liaise with the institutions that they regulate to tell them what our priorities are and so forth. They come to us and we also have to know our priorities with government advising us to make a priority as it were. We take note of that.
We make sure we are monitoring and if there are infringements and infractions, I can tell you our guidelines are very clear. Where money is given to an institution and it does not use it or it diverts it, we will come in.
There are cases where the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offenses Commission and other agencies have had to come in to ensure that these things are done in compliance with our laws and our guidelines.
So we just don’t give them the money and turn our face the other way. We are monitoring. Tranches of payments are normally either one or two depending on the category. In most cases, three tranches – first, second and third tranch. Majority are 50 per cent then 35 per cent and 15 per cent.
But there are some that are 60 per cent. So yes, we don’t handle directly most of it. It is in very rare cases like the presidential projects that we have additional control.
There are few of such, few of those projects that come once in a while. They are very rare. I can tell you that over 90 per cent of our projects are handled directly by beneficiary institutions.
Despite your monitoring, there are cases where projects fail in institutions…
Definitely. We had some cases. We have some projects that have been hanging out there. Some of them are even held up by litigation. Litigations at the level of procure ment protocol, of picking out through tender process. There are some litigations but most of them have to do with implementation stage.
There are projects that you are likely going to see that they are completed but substandard. They have constituted an embarrassment to us. We are taking strong measures now and there are those that have been hanging out there, the high impact projects that should be completed in one to two years at most, will be there for eight, nine to 10 years uncompleted.
It is unacceptable and don’t forget the value of money so approved because we will not review the money upward, no. So the value is going down to the disadvantage of the institution that is implementing it at slow pace. So there have been serious concerns by the board of trustees and so very tough actions are now being taken both by way of timely delivery, qualitative delivery, we are taking cognizance of that and sanctions have been introduced, including taking away the money after a certain period. We have done that.
There seems to be some levels of duplication of your intervention projects by some institutions. Why is TETFund doing about this?
You are bringing me to the latest issue that came up in respect of our interventions in some institutions. Even the University of Ibadan was mentioned.
What we discovered is that some people worked on monitoring delivery reports rather than ultimate final report and were giving figures that contradict the reality based on what we have here. In fact, it is not as if we are as reckless. It will be very unfair of TETFund.
Today, I can tell you that the tallest infrastructure in Lagos State is in Yaba and it is a TETFund building. Without fear of contradictions I know this. We are not careless. My director of finance came to me and said there are a lot of misrepresentations. People went to either the Senate Committee or House of Representatives Committee (on tertiary education and TETFund) instead of reconciling with us.
Sometimes, somebody somewhere had carried the information about a particular institution and then there was a mix up. It is not as if somebody wants to misrepresent any fact. I don’t see how Prof. Ogundipe in the University of Lagos, I know him, would want to tell me that there is a 15 storey building when it is supposed to be a seven storey building, no.
With due respect, he is a man of integrity. The collapsed building that you mentioned in UNILAG, it was not a collapsed building. It was a partial collapse, just a section of it. I went there for God sake. These things happen even in Abuja here.
Of the number of buildings that we are putting up, if there had been so far the cases of collapsed building, it is about at most three or four so far in about four years. Let me jokingly say I don’t think we are doing badly. Honestly speaking, I don’t think we are doing badly.
I was told that about three and a half years ago, the Nigerian Society of Engineers at their annual meeting had reported that in terms of quality delivery in the public sector, TETFund is number one, the best. Believe me. I am not an engineer. It was an engineer that was at that meeting who met me somewhere that was saying it.
He was commending me. At that time I had been disengaged. I was not even in TETFund. He said my brother, thank God for what you did. NSE, believe me, assess the quality of infrastructure and TETFund was number one.
We are conscious to make sure that there is no misrepresentation as it were. If there is a problem, when I mentioned the other day, I felt short of mentioning some institutions. I don’t want to do that at a press conference where I will start naming and shaming them, I won’t do that but believe me, they know themselves; some of the institutions that have disappointed us.
We use the word “disappointed us.” We will not accept it and we have told them. They must get their acts right. We are very conscious. Whatever we need to do we will continue to do it.
Three days between Delta, Imo, Anambra and Edo, what we commissioned were quality projects, very quality projects and I am proud to be associated with them. The institutions were happy and the students were happy. I wonder if we could be doing something more miraculous than that.
