THE Federal Government has stopped postgraduate training programmes for Nigerian lecturers and scholarship awards to students to study in “mushroom” and low-ranking universities abroad.
Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Dr Abdullahi Baffa, made this known during the weekend in Abuja when he received the leadership of Education Correspondents Association of Nigeria (ECAN) led by its chairman, Mr Chuks Ukwuatu on courtesy call.
He deplored the practice in the past where lecturers were sent by their institutions to study in mushroom and bottom-of-the-league universities abroad under the TETFund Academic Staff Training and Development (AST & D) intervention programme.
Baffa said, “from 2017, we have stopped that,” stressing that public fund would only be spent to train scholars in top-of-the-league universities across the world.
He said: “We are sending scholars to pursue higher degrees abroad but we are not putting the interest of the country in trying to know what these scholars are studying and where they are going.
“Our scholars who are supposed to be teaching and conduct research in tertiary instructions, who are supposed to be training and supporting the provision of high level manpower that would drive the nation’s economy should be trained in the best universities in the world,” he said.
In the same vein, Dr Baffa said he has stopped the beneficiary institutions from sending their scholars to attend mushroom conferences, warning that public fund would only be spent to support scholars in attending real academic conferences.
“We are cutting off or vetting out all that to ensure that we are getting value for money,” he said.
On the research intervention, which the agency earmarked about N3billion National Research Fund, the Executive Secretary said there must be real feedback from beneficiaries of the research grant.
“When we give you research grant, we expect you to publish in First Quartile or Second Quartile Journals. We will also expect you to send that article to us as evidence that you have conducted research.
“By this, the country is gaining because you are improving the citation index of Nigeria, improving the citation index of your institution and also improving your worth as a scholar by publishing in the best journals around the world,” he said.
Journals are categorised into four-first quartile, second quartile, third quartile and fourth quartile and Baffa said for a nation or institution to have a good citation index, its scholars must be publishing in first or second quartile journals.
He decried a situation where scholars publish in unindexed journals, saying this would not help the institutions, the nation or scholars themselves.
He took a historic account leading to the establishment of the former Education Trust Fund (ETF) during the Ibrahim Babangida military government to disprove those clamoring for private universities to be included as beneficiary of the intervention fund.
He explained that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and government sat down and negotiated and arrived at an agreement and the then government of Babangida, gave two options: “One, introduce tuition fees so that we can generate the money to implement the agreement or Union, tell us how we are going to get this money”.
Accordingly, he said ASUU gave three options, the second of which was to charge education tax on all companies in Nigeria and use that education tax to support education.
“So, Education Tax Fund was establish after Babangida Presidency accepted the advice of ASUU on how to raise money to implement the agreement,” he said.
He, therefore, ruled out the possibility of including private instructions in the beneficiary list of the current TETFund, saying Education Tax Fund was established simply to run away from charging tuition fees on students and that there was no way private institutions that are charging fees on students could turnaround to say hey must benefit from the intervention.
He also said the clamour by some research institutions and other agencies of government to be included in the beneficiary list were against the law.
According to Baffa, TETFund Act, specifically defines who the beneficiary institutions are. It (Act as amended in 2011) says public universities, public Polytechnics and public colleges of education, adding that any tertiary institution that is not so named is not qualified by the law to be on the beneficiary list.
He equally said he was not in support of any attempt to further review the Act, arguing that any attempt to increase the number of beneficiary institutions significantly would dilute the impact that TETFund is making. The TETfund boss also disclosed that beneficiary institutions have been forbid from using their allocation to build “match-box” structures, saying all structures in the nation’s tertiary education must be big, beautiful, and must have high quality utility value.
“Era of having cubicle in our tertiary institutions is gone and is gone for good,” he said.
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