Sonny Echono, the Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), has recently completed his first year in the position. But his monumental efforts to reposition Nigeria’s tertiary education sector speak for themselves in terms of his enormous accomplishments, as captioned by Entrepreneurng report.
Without a doubt, the TETFund under Echono has made significant strides in research, innovations, partnerships, and efforts to address the textbook deficit in tertiary institutions.
Echono has also performed admirably in the area of revenue generation, which is commendable given the challenge of the lack of funding that pervades all government-owned tertiary institutions in the nation.
Echono advocated for a higher tertiary education tax because he knew the Fund needed more money to accomplish its objectives. The Finance Bill 2023, which is pending President Muhammadu Buhari’s approval, calls for an increase to three percent even though the tax was raised to 2.5 percent. Every Nigerian corporation must pay the tax at a rate of 2.5%. (as amended in the 2021 Finance Act).
The Fund can broaden the scope of its actions with the anticipated increase. Based on this knowledge, the Executive Secretary urged the President to sign the Finance Act amendment bill as a parting present to the education industry and a suitable conclusion to his obvious intention to increase education financing in the nation during the week.
Echono requested the presentation opresenceon guidelines and allocation letters to beneficiary institutions and the 2023 Annual Strategic Planning Workshop.
In light of the ongoing industrial actions taken by tertiary institutions due to infrastructure deficit, outdated equipment, and bad working conditions, particularly for academic staff, Echono’s request to Mr. President to pass the law before leaving office in May has become extremely urgent.
Beyond the presentation, the forum sought to gather input from stakeholders and assess the effectiveness of its intervention lines to enable the Fund to carry out its mandate more successfully and effectively.
He credited the current success of the country’s tertiary education sector to President Buhari’s administration’s dedication to high-quality education while announcing that the government had granted N320 billion for public tertiary institutions.
He pointed out that a total of N1.702 trillion has been distributed as an Education Tax collection to public universities, polytechnics, and institutions of education throughout eight years (from 2015 to the present).
This amount was in comparison to the total amount of N1.249 trillion that was disbursed between the Fund’s 1993 founding and 2014 (21 years).
In conclusion, public universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education in the nation were the beneficiaries of the N320, 345, 040, and 835 TETFund intervention grants for the year 2023.
Source: The GuardianÂ
