The Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, has said the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) will not fund new constructions in 2025.
Mr Alausa said the Fund will only focus on maintenance of existing facilities in tertiary institutions.
Speaking on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Tuesday, he said the directive, which came from President Bola Tinubu, has also been communicated to TETFund Executive Secretary, Sonny Echono.
“One priority area we’re going to be doing is to fix these infrastructures. Rehabilitate, improve and get them to a very high standard,” he said on the television programme.
“Enough of building new buildings. I just had a meeting with the TETFund executive secretary yesterday to communicate in clear terms the directives given by the president to me.”
He added that public universities, polytechnics and colleges of education will use their intervention funds to be disbursed in 2025 to repair and rehabilitate hostels, lecture theatres, auditoriums, laboratories and classes as well as offices.
The education minister said TETFund has performed well in funding construction in Nigerian tertiary institutions.
He added that the directive was to ensure that “we get maximum output of every single Naira that TETFund is sending to our tertiary institutions.”
TETFund is an intervention agency for Nigerian public tertiary institutions established by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund Act 2011.
It administers, manages, disburses, and monitors the judicious utilisation of the now 3 per cent Tertiary Education Tax paid by all registered companies operating in Nigeria.
It was formerly the Education Tax Act (1993) with a mandate to operate as an intervention fund to all levels of public education –from basic to tertiary education.
However, in 2011, the Act was repealed and replaced with the TETFund Act which focuses only on public universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
The education tax, which was formerly 2 per cent, was increased to 3 per cent by last year’s finance Act.
Nigerian tertiary institutions have relied heavily on TETFund for capital projects in the past years as funding from the government continues to dwindle.
Meanwhile, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) recently raised concerns that TETFund is gradually being crippled by the Tax Reform Bill currently before the National Assembly.
ASUU noted that the bill, if passed, will reduce funding for TETFund for the first two years and dry it up completely by 2030
The union stressed that TETFund interventions have been instrumental to infrastructural development and training of Nigerian academics.
The academic union rejected the part of the proposed tax bill that repealed the three per cent education tax currently accrued to TETFund per the Finance Act (2023).
Instead, the bill proposed a flat four per cent development levy to be shared between TETFund, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), and the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND).
But ASUU, which has always opposed both the establishment and operation of NELFUND, said the shift in funding towards student loans may be an approach to force public tertiary education institutions to continue to hike fees payable by students.
“The phasing out of TETFund would cause a momentous danger to tertiary education in Nigeria, as its aids to the physical infrastructure and human capital development would eventually come to a stop.
“This move could also lead to students becoming protracted debtors, imitating the financial challenges faced by the nation itself,” the union said at a press conference in Abuja.
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