TETFund Targets 100,000 Academics For Capacity Building

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) says the turnover of academics sponsored for capacity building on staff development and training across the tertiary institutions will rise to 100,000

The Executive Secretary of the fund, Architect Sonny Echono, revealed this at the 16th Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria ,ABU, Alumni annual General Assembly held at Centre of excellence of the institution.

He explained that already more than 90,000 academics from universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education were supported for various programmes under staff development training.

Mr Echono further said the number of benifitiaries will be 100,000 before the end of this year.

Speaking at the occasion, the vice chancellor of ABU , Professor Kabir Bala, said that in its 60 years of existence, the University has grown significantly in terms of the number of academic units and programmes, staff strength and students enrollment, teaching and research facilities, adding that currently there were 18 facilities, 108 academic departments and others.

The vice chancellor represented by his Deputy on administration, Professor Ahmad Ibrahim Doko, said the university has no fewer than 98 undergraduate programmes and 539 postgraduate programmes.

Professor Bala pointed out that the staff strength of the School stood at 3000 academic staff and over 8,000 non teaching staff with over 45,000 undergraduate students and 20,000 postgraduate students.

He said, “In it’s entire history of existence the university can boast of having significantly met with developmental needs of which it was established especially with regards to the production of high quality graduates and community services in engineering, Environmental Design, the Medical Sciences, Agriculture, the Humanities, Education and Natural Sciences.

“The University has numerous alumni who are found in different Sectors in all parts of Nigeria, Africa, Europe, Asia and United States.

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“From the foregoing it is quite obvious that enormous amount of resources are required for routine teaching and research, operations and maintenance of the system.”

However, the Vice Chancellor complained that the provision by government as proprietor of the school was grossly inadequate, saying that the only source was the student charges (not fees) which was too meagre to make any reasonable impact with maximum 170 million annual budgetary allocation for overhead over the past decade, the university spend average of 900 million per anum to electricity tariff in addition to annual consumption of over 500,000 litres of diesel without any to its asset base.

In his message, the Minister of Education, Mal Adamu Adamu, through the Chairman Governing Council and Pro Chancellor, University of Abuja, Professor Ahmad Muhammad Modibbo, appealed to the Alumni to call on the striking academics under auspices of Academic Staff Union (ASUU) to suspend their strike and negotiate with government.

earlier in his welcome address, the President of the association Dr Ibrahim Sani Khalil, said that the Annual General Assembly was home coming.

In March this year, the executive secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Professor Elias Suleiman Bogoro said Nigerian researchers had no cause to be poor because the agency would pay more attention to research and development in nation’s higher institutions of learning.