The South-East Polytechnic with 30 students

AT the 2025 one-day strategic interactive workshops for heads of institutions, bursars and heads of procurement of the Tertiary Education Tax Fund’s (TETFund) beneficiary institutions in Abuja recently, the Executive Secretary of the Fund, Sonny Echono, made a starling disclosure that smacks of monumental and systematic sleaze involving one the beneficiary tertiary institutions. The yet-to-be-named tertiary institution said to be a four-year-old Polytechnic in the South-East allegedly has just 30 students, even though it has been receiving funds in billions of naira by way of state interventions through TETFund.

Mr Echono was apparently scandalised by the discovery and he had this to say about the disturbing development: “I was so embarrassed when it was brought to my attention that a particular polytechnic in the South-East that has been there for four years has only 30 students.The South-East of all places where if you go to any state, including the northern region, you will see students from the South-East in those institutions, yet this was put at their doorstep, and they have only 30 students and they have been accessing all their annual disbursements.”

While the Executive Secretary’s criticism of the saddening development is in order, his disaffection should not be just about the alleged crookedness of the management of the polytechnic but also about dereliction of duty by TETFund’s management and staff, exemplified by the lack of monitoring and supervision which culminated in the suspected corrupt act. The waste associated with this sordid disclosure was patently avoidable and the party that has a duty to ensure it did not happen must also be held to account, even for possible complicity. 

Besides, this story is curious and the fact that the alleged corruption was perpetrated over four years undetected makes the narrative even more unusual. It is yet unclear why Echono did not mention the name of the polytechnic involved in the alleged scandal, especially against the backdrop of the intervention by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Putting the identity of the polytechnic within the public domain may even encourage citizens who have information that could help the investigation of the anti-graft agency to come forward.

This out-of-the-ordinary narrative necessarily triggers some reasonable questions, albeit without prejudicing the line of questioning of the culprits by the EFCC: how can a polytechnic which has a Governing Board, Rector, bursary, librarian, lecturers and a number of courses have just 30 students? What happened to its students’ admission exercise in four years? What is the strength of the teaching and non-teaching staff? Were the annual budgets not scrutinised by the National Assembly? Or was it that the National Assembly had been approving budgets that did not indicate the polytechnic’s student population? Had there been no visitation panels to the school? How many courses does the school have and who accredited the courses? Were the courses accredited without verification?

During admissions, there is a certain percentage for catchment areas and non-catchment areas, so how do you have 30 students with this arrangement? What has the Ministry of Education been doing? What has the billions of naira the polytechnic received annually from TETFund been spent on? Evidently, public funds have been flushed down the drain, and sadly so at a time when the country’s tottering economy needs patriotic and prudent officials to manage scarce national resources.

 To be sure, the creation or conversion of official bureaucracies as a special purpose vehicle to divert public funds, line the pockets of operators and/or give jobs to the boys, is not novel in this clime. We recall the case of the Ogun State-owned Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), which had a guest house with eight rooms at a time, manned by 32 staffers who drew monthly salaries! There is also the September 2022 story of the Professor Mohammed Abdullahi-led National Board for Arabic and Islamic Studies (NBAIS) which allegedly spent N8.5 billion to conduct an examination yearly for students with a staff strength of 5,963! And of the N410 million it claimed to generate yearly, it remitted just N30 million to the official coffers.

The shocking and embarrassing revelations signpost the suboptimal way public funds are deliberately or carelessly managed in the country, often with a view to diverting them, dispensing favours, or lining private pockets. Sadly, everything boils down to ineffective and inefficient management of public resources, not necessarily out of incompetence but usually because of prioritisation of selfish interests over and above public good. This tendency is both criminal and morally reprehensible.

The cases of systematic official sleaze referenced here are not isolated. There are indications that virtually every ministry, department or agency reeks of official corruption. There is therefore the need to look deeper into the instant case while also beaming a searchlight on every office that is vested with power to spend public funds.

Again, and more importantly, the anti-graft war should be refocused to place more premium on preventing corruption by blocking loopholes in bureaucracy in financial matters that unscrupulous persons often latch onto to perpetrate corruption. Conducting postmortems on acts of corruption after enormous damage has been done and sanctioning culprits are not enough, especially when full recovery of the proceeds of crime are hardly assured. It will also help to rein in official sleaze if failure to perform official monitoring/supervisory function that culminates in the loss of official resources to thieves is treated as an act of corruption.

The raison d’être for any academic institution is to train students. Therefore, its existence becomes a subject of interrogation if it has a negligible number of students or no students at all. And it is even worse when such an institution is carrying on, utilising official resources as if it is fulfilling the objective of its creation.

Therefore, the board and management of the unnamed polytechnic which drew huge amounts of money annually from TETFund to cater to the needs of just 30 students should be made to account for this bizarre and sordid state of affairs. The country cannot continue to brook inefficiency and profligacy in the management of public funds under any guise.

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