How would you evaluate the significance of the fund to higher institutions?
Government has categorised and established a law for an Education Tax Fund that later became Education Trust Fund but ASUU insisted that the body was solely meant for the public tertiary institution subsector and in 2011, the TETfund Ac
t replaced the previous ones to cater for the needs of universities, polytechnics and Colleges of Education.
The first major concern at that time was to improve decaying infrastructure at higher institutions.
You will appreciate that building projects have to come up due to the fact that we witnessed a situation where annual budgetary funds for recurrent services, specifically salaries, are even being paid under pressure and the capital expenditure is insufficient as majority of the universities are getting less than N100 million. This, in many cases, may handle only three capital requirements and when you have 30, it is less 10 per cent of the requirement that is met. That is why the fund has to come in to bail out the larger needs of those institutions.
Between 2009 and 2010 when basic education was included, you could hardly see the impact, but from 2011, if you have gone to any of the public universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, you will notice over the last 8 years, massive physical differences and I am sure you would agree with me that TETfund has worked.
Many African countries have come to copy our concept of non-budgetary window in which the money is coming from 2 per cent accessible tax from profit making entities in the country.
Beyond infrastructure, there is what we call the content component. For universities, the content component includes research, journal publication, library development and academic staff training. Today, TETfund is the largest scholarship body providing support for training at Master’s and PhD levels in this country both locally and overseas.
We have no rivals at the moment; we went round other parts of the world and we saw research funds kept centrally either for science, STEM or a cross-cutting research outfit.
In Nigeria today, outside the National Research Fund for TETfund, there is no other visible research funding outfit and I think that is not good enough. That is why we created a research fund and centres of excellence and we are determined that a committee will be put up over the next two years to work with government and advise it on the establishment of a National R&D Foundation for Nigeria, a cross cutting, cross disciplinary research platform that will look at funding of research in research communities and the tertiary institutions led by the universities.
Historically, universities are leaders of research, the research institutes and centres of excellence and we have many other institutions that can benefit just like the universities.
Universities have advanced in terms of research because they train and mentor others while research institutes’ job is concentrated on their mandate but our mandate includes mentoring others.
There is a relationship between universities and research institutes across the world and there will always be the benefit to the institute if the university can undertake research in an area they need to add value; what I call problem solving research.
Unfortunately in Nigeria, the universities have concentrated on teaching at the expense of research and even when we do research it’s for promotion and we are clapping when they mention a professor has 500 publications when out of the 500 there is none that a product was developed from.
This is why for the first time, the economic summit meeting that was held this week, the academia and industries were seated on the same platform. That has never happened before.
This is what has been missing, the Nigerian lecturers have not found it necessary to reach out to industries, and the industries do not want to recognize Nigerian professors. No matter how good they may be, they would rather outsource to consultancies and universities abroad to our disadvantage.
At the moment, TETfund wants to focus more on research, the content component, develop our libraries and we have to understand that and get the relevant software and people must be acquainted with it.
Another thing we have been emphasising on is the quality of our infrastructure. We have been emphasising on numbers because the numbers were not even there; those days, 2,000 students will sit in one lecture theatre but that has significantly reduced because of TETfund interventions.
What other plans do you have looking forward?
We are hoping to engage in hostels development, which is an area of embarrassment in our universities. The Executive Secretary of NUC said recently that only 15 per cent of Nigerian students are in hostels; that is an embarrassment. How do we intend to attract scholars from outside if there is no accommodation? That our students are living with criminals because there are no hostels and if we build hostels, they are congested; a room meant for four people will have 10 or more people, it is that bad.
We are hoping to go for centres of excellence in the next five years. It is only the World Bank that has been giving us that. From next year we want to have centres of excellence and if possible, multi-disciplinary laboratories mainly around STEM disciplines.
We don’t like this idea of researchers operating in silence for too long; they must exchange ideas, even the person working on artificial intelligence on biotechnology should be able to get an idea from anthropologists, economists, or management experts because they are also innovative and innovation cuts across. It requires a lot of creativity, from more than one single discipline.
There seems to be disagreement among policy makers on the establishment of more universities?
Private universities have never solved our problems as such. Let’s look at the numbers: before now, private universities slightly outnumbered public ones, but now the public owned have outnumbered private ones and in terms of student population, public universities have 94 per cent.
The problem is majority of Nigerian students cannot afford to attend private universities and that is why the TETfund law made a lot of sense that we are emphasising on public institutions.
Proliferation of higher institutions is embarrassing; we have to apply some break. Yes! Many places want universities established for them, but that does not solve the problem.
It is the effectiveness of institutions that matters not the numbers and it reduces the standard and quality.
What are you doing about scholars going abroad to universities with lower standards?
Our standard has been prescribed; you cannot go to universities with lower standard than that of Nigeria; we have taken care of that. My predecessor came and attempted to put up some conditions but we said TETfund does not rank universities; it is NUC that recognizes and ranks universities and sends them to us.
