|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The federal government has announced it’s approval of N161 billion for the 2018 intervention programme of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).
Abdulahi Baffa, Executive Secretary of TETFund, disclosed this in Abuja, stating that the amount represents the education tax collected in 2017 adding that it has been allocated to the eligible institutions for 2019 intervention activities in accordance with the provisions of the TETFund Act 2011.
“Consequently, each public university will get an allocation of N785,832,700.00; each public polytechnic N536,703,502.00; and each college of education will get an allocation of N510,084,900.00 respectively,” he said.
Baffa described the intervention as another massive boost to the higher education institutions in the country which is to be utilized for 2019 intervention activities in all the benefiting public tertiary education institutions in Nigeria.
Speaking further, Baffa explained that as at November 2018, the total education tax collection stood at N200,793,193,208.54, indicating an increase of about 25.47 per cent over the previous year’s collection of N154.9Billion.
Calling on all beneficiary institutions to proceed to the fund’s head office in Abuja to collect their allocation letters beginning from Monday 7th January, 2019, he added that the growth in the education tax collection is a clear confirmation that Nigeria’s economy has recovered from the avoidable recession it was plunged into.
“The increased collection will obviously translate to a bigger allocation for Public Tertiary Education Institutions and therefore more projects, more scholarships, more research funds in the institutions, he added.
“In 2018 Fund disbursement for the period January – December, 2018 across the various intervention lines was N133.84 Billion. The distribution across the three levels are: Universities – N66.93Billion, Polytechnics – N32.37Billion, Colleges of Education –N32.65Billion while others were N1.89 Billion”.
“The Fund reaped the benefits of its 2017 Projects Proposal Defense and Access Clinic for institutions in 2018 with about 97% increase in access of intervention fund by Beneficiary Institutions (from N69.18B in 2017 to N133.84B in 2018) as shown in the table below,” he said.
He said in 2018, the Board of Trustees of the Fund approved the enlistment of 16 new beneficiary institutions after meeting all the requirements of enlistment, adding that the inclusion was the first time such a large number of institutions got enlisted and publicly presented with certificates.
The newly enlisted institutions include: Nigerian Army University, Biu; Ondo State University of Science and Technology, Okitipupa; First Technical University, Ibadan; Air Force Institute of Technology, Kaduna; Binyaminu Usman Polytechnics, among others.
Cynthia Egboboh, Abuja.
