The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has again expressed worry over the electricity crisis that Nigerian tertiary institutions, especially universities are confronted with due to huge increases in tariff for the use of the essential commodity, promising to intervene to tackle the challenge.
The Executive Secretary of TETFUND, Mr Sonny Echono, made the promise in Lagos over weekend at an award ceremony organised by the New Telegraph Newspapers.
Many Nigerians, corporate bodies, and government agencies including TETFUND were given awards at the event.
TETFund won the New Telegraph’s Most Improved Government Agency of the Year 2024 at the event.
Echono mentioned that the TETFund’s intervention is to lessen the financial burden the high energy costs has brought on Nigerian universities threatening their effective teaching and learning.
He added that the effort is to complement the efforts of the federal government that is planning to install solar energy panels in some of the higher tertiary institutions.
Some public universities such as the University of Lagos, the University of Ibadan, and Ahmadu Bello University, because of being categorised as “Band A” users by their respective electricity distribution companies, are each slammed with monthly power bills in excess of N300 million, which they found extremely difficult to cope with.
Echono expressed optimism that this year would be a bright year for the agency, as it consolidates on previous gains and moves into another level of its intervention activities across public tertiary schools in the country.
“That is why this award is dedicated to Mr President and the Minister of Education, who have been pushing us to ensure judicious use of the allocated resources and to also ensure that our beneficiary institutions use resources allocated to them judiciously too.
“We believe that 2025 is going to be our brightest year of intervention as we are going to tailor our interventions to the needs of our beneficiary institutions. “We are focusing on things like electricity. We know that most of our beneficiary institutions are facing the challenge of paying energy bills and we are going to key into the move by the federal government to provide solar power to a number of public tertiary institutions.
“The importance of energy to run the institutions cannot be overemphasised.
“We will also improve the condition for teaching and learning.
“We will improve the conditions of hostels and we will enhance research efforts and capacities of our lecturers.
“Also, we will ensure that our research centres are excellent in nature and that we won’t need to send research samples abroad again.
“We will continue efforts to improve the capacities of our institutions to become centres of excellence and thereby improve their global rankings and also make our students to be globally competitive,” he said.
When asked whether the agency is not being overburdened by the continued establishment of higher institutions by the government, as it is mandatory for it to cater to such institutions, Echono said establishing new tertiary schools by government is in order more importantly because of the increasing number of admission seekers.
According to him, in a situation where over two million candidates seek admission to tertiary institutions yearly and only between 600,000 and 700,000 are admitted, it means we still need more higher institutions.
“People are paying their taxes and we have increase in our resources. Since we are judiciously using available resources, we are on course to fulfil our mandate,” he promised.
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