Tax reform bills: FG should not tamper with TETFUND — ASUU

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has raised serious concern over the fear of the possible scrapping of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) by the Federal Government using the tax reform bills currently before the National Assembly to act.

The union called on the National Assembly, especially the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas to use their constitutional powers to protect TETFund from imminent death through the Tax Bill 2024.

The university lecturers raised this concern in a statement signed by their national president, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke and made available to Nigerian Tribune on Tuesday.

According to ASUU, it is alarming, dangerous and unpatriotic to allow the proposed new tax regime to negatively affect the Education Tax, called the development levy, to bankroll TETFund’s programmes on the excuse of ceding the money of the newly established Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND).

ASUU noted that “Section 59(3) of the Nigeria Tax Bill (NTB) 2024 specifically states that only 50% of the Development Levy would be made available to TETFund in 2025 and 2026 while NITDA, NASENI, and NELFUND would share the remaining percentages.

“TETFund will also receive ‘66.7% in 2027, 2028 and 2029 years of assessment’ but ‘0% in 2030 year of assessment and thereafter.”

“The far-reaching consequence of the new tax system is that from 2030, all funds generated from the Development Levy will be passed to NELFUND.

“We find this development as a union not only worrisome but also inimical to our national development objective because of the potential danger to the survival of TETFund. “The union further observed that viewing TETFund as the backbone for infrastructural development, postgraduate training and research capacity building in Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions in the last 25 years, taking any percentage out of the Education Tax (Development Levy) to service another agency not known to the Act establishing TETFund in 2011 is illegal and should not be allowed to stand.

“Giving zero allocation of Development Levy to TETFund as from 2030 is a technical way of killing the agency as the purported admonishment that TETFund should seek innovative ways of generating its funds is spurious and ill-advised.

“So, replacing TETFund with NELFUND is tantamount to killing a parent to keep a newborn child alive which is unethical and against the principle of natural justice.”

ASUU stated that the impact of TETFund on campuses is beyond description and scrapping it will therefore take Nigeria’s public tertiary education many years back and also undermine the modest gains in repositioning Nigerian universities for global reckoning and transformative development.

“So, Nigeria should be improving on the operations and sustainability of TETFUND and not killing the agency,” ASUU concluded.

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