The Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Alhaji Kashim Imam, has said that no less than 10,000 projects and more than 30,000 trainings have been carried out for the staff of various tertiary institutions.
Imam, unveiled this on Monday in Maiduguri during a joint TETFund/FIRS interactive forum with the theme: “Improving Education Development Tax (EDT) collection in the post-pandemic era.”
According to Kashim, the projects are complete or ongoing, such as auditoriums, laboratories, lecture halls in 226 tertiary institutions across the country.
“Last year alone, we designated 12 universities as centers of excellence and funded those universities to the tune of N12 billion, that is, one billion each to fund research.
“We reproduce that with six polytechnics and six faculties of education. These are in addition to several other interventions,” Kashim said.
Kashim said the interactive session was designed to bring heads together with the staff of the Federal Internal Revenue Service (FIRS) who are responsible for the collection of the education tax and also an opportunity for the fund to account for itself.
In his speech, the President of FIRS, Mr. Muhammad Nami, who spoke about how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the generation of income affecting TETFund, assured that things have started to improve.
Nami, who represented Abba, the Director Tax Operating Group, FIRS, spoke about the main innovations to improve revenue collection and assured TETFund of the service‘s support to fulfill its mandate.
In his remarks, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Maiduguri, Prof. Aliyu Shugaba, represented by Prof. Mohammed Laminu, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Administration, praised TETFund for its support of tertiary institutions, adding that without the fund many institutions would have had been crippled.
“We don’t know where we (the institutions) would be without TETund. We really thank the government for TETFund,” said Shugaba.
The Nigerian News Agency reports that highlights of the occasion included testimonials from those who benefited from TETFUND’s training.
There was also the presentation of a document on the activities of TETFund Innenne, the Director of Strategic Planning and Development of TETFund, who represented the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Prof. Suleiman Bogoro
