INTERVIEW: Claim that TETFund is a cesspool of corruption untrue – Echono

The Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Sonny Echono, has countered the notion in some quarters that the agency is a cesspool of corruption.

In an interview with journalists in Abuja during the week, Echono also addressed the claim that TETFund is often associated with abandoned projects and other sundry issues.

DAILY POST was there and brings you the excerpts:

Some stakeholders believe that TETFund is a cesspool of corruption. What do you feel about this and what are you doing to curb it?

People are invited to come and see the new TETFund. When I was asked to come here, I was given a mandate and I have introduced reforms, made very powerful enemies and you can see some bits of that. It shows that we have done a quick deal in reforming our systems to the acknowledgement of all our stakeholders.

The initial impression that TETFund is a cesspool of corruption was an exaggerated one. I can confirm that from my experience. It was an exaggeration of what was happening. There were some types of cartels that were in charge of TETFund projects and they also felt that all manners of political leaders could come to TETFund, collect what they call special intervention. There was no form of system or processes in place. I invited ICPC to come and inspect the systems and they did. They have come back the second time.

We have resolved issues of lecturers who get trained and they abscond. There are lecturers who collect money to go for workshops and conferences but they don’t go. We are recovering money. We are punishing and prosecuting them.

The ones that have absconded, we also have a programme through our embassies, through the embassies of the countries which they are. That is why our MoU again is coming in. When we sign an MoU with you, you must repatriate the student to us. It’s your responsibility. We didn’t have that before. That was why they could jump their bond. So, we have cleaned that out. We’ve done a lot of reforms. We run a very transparent system.

TETFund is often associated with abandoned projects. It has practically become a thing. What are you doing about this?

We’ve got approval to create a special intervention line for completion of abandoned projects. Today, I met with two institutions. When they come, we invite them to discuss these projects. We have a whole department for monitoring projects.

But, by the grace of God, we are completing abandoned projects. There are some that are basically technical issues. Some are contractual. The contractor is not competent.

Everybody assumes that any project you see on campus is a TETFund project. That’s not correct. The highest number of projects on our campuses that are abandoned are those from the regular projects and it is because of the way funding is done in our budgeting system, which is not efficient. TETFund has one of the highest rates of completion compared to others. As I speak, I have 180 projects ready for commissioning.

Can you quickly speak on the issue of paying a local company in dollars?

It is not true. It is false. The records are very clear. We paid Blackboard directly through CBN. We did not pay a single dollar to any local company. We have no way of doing that. The central bank is there; they can check. We have no account in any commercial bank.

In the first place, these payments are passing through CBN. As I said earlier, we are not the one paying. We are only giving instructions. We do offshore, but it goes straight to the offshore company directly.

Please, give us an introduction of the projects in question, the execution status at the moment and the success rate?

In 2016, the Fund in liaison with our beneficiary institutions came up with a roadmap on ICT and the thinking then was also because there was a major transformation going on in the education sector across the globe. In Nigeria, there are particular identified challenges.

We are losing a lot of our lecturers in droves and they are going abroad. We are also having the most youthful population. So many young people wanting to get admission to institutions and the facilities you have in terms of classrooms, hostels and so on in our schools will not be enough to cater for all these students. So, it was felt that we should leverage ICT to increase access and the way to go about it is to have a hybrid mode of education where even if you are not physically there, you can do online programmes. Even institutions can also do what we call a hybrid, both online and face-to-face.

This roadmap was designed from 2016 and has been implemented. We have three standing committees made up of experts in ICT that are advising on this and each year when we now prepare for our disbursement guideline, we come up with what the priorities for the coming year will be and this we now take to our stakeholders forum. The stakeholders forum is where all the heads of beneficiary institutions come together with us, with the unions and all the other actors to decide the projects to be adopted for the following year.

For the current programme, last year, the committee recommended that we deepen the ICT implementation in the institutions. We agreed that we are going to make allocations for it — N100 million for each university and N50 million for each polytechnic and college of education for ICT.

Of this amount, 50% will be targeted at the peculiar needs of the institutions. So, every school will determine what they need to use that for whether they are going to buy computers, whether they are going to extend fiber, or whether they are preparing for, maybe sustainable power, solar, or whatever it is to support their ICT infrastructure. So, half of that resource is used for that. Then, the other half is to be used for what we now call converged services and that include these programmes we were talking about.

A key element in this year’s programme incorporates this training component that we want to give. We now have Teras.

Teras has all sorts of systems, anti-plagiarism checkers. We have Ipsco, with so many libraries across the world, the digital library. If you don’t even teach your students and their scholars how to access these resources, how to manipulate them, because that is now replacing the old books and all of that, then you are not going to get enough access. This was why we designed this major programme for training of both students and staff, to understand the use of those platforms, the use of communication skills, and being able to participate online, be able to do assignments, how to submit it online, how to engage in interactive sessions and tests. We had no intention of getting involved in the implementation as we are now, which is why we allocated the money to the schools.

The only reason why the figures are put together is because of the fact that, particularly for the licensing fee, it has to be done in dollars. You saw what we did there. We now had to pay in bulk once to the institution on their behalf and they all consented because they were happy with what we did. By crashing the cost, they all made savings.

We are just like standing in the middle. Please bring down, crash your costs to the schools based on this volume, we are guaranteeing for you. That is the main essence of the MoU. On our part, as I told you earlier, when they say we should handle this on their behalf, we explored a number of functions because our reaction was actually evolving.

We started by seeing the vendors for these companies and we got approval. I also have that. I will show it to you from BPP. They are based on what we call intellectual property rights. If I want to buy a Boeing plane, there is no point asking other aircraft manufacturers to quote for a Boeing plane because it is only Boeing that produce their own. So, that is how intellectual property is treated. It’s only the accredited vendors that would have come to sell it or buy it. But we advise that why deal with vendors that have very limited capacity to give any discount? The only capacity they have is maybe 10%. Whatever percentage commission they pay them, they may reduce from it because they want your market.

But if you are going to talk about almost getting 40% or 60% discount, you have to get to the owner of the copyright, the main company itself, and that was how it led us to the two intellectual property owners and we achieved that huge discount.

So, once that was done, again, and the systems were agreed upon. The value of the discount, it was about 60% that we got.