The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has accused governors of establishing state universities they cannot fund.
This was stated on Thursday by the President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Emmanuel Osodeke in an interview on Channels Television.
The ASUU President noted that most governors duplicate universities in their states to get a piece of the pie from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).
He said, “Any governor today establishing a university is eyeing TETFund as a source of funding.”
Even though the TETFund is meant to support public universities through intervention, according to Osodeke, politicians and government employees have been utilising it as a cash cow to be milked dry through dubious contract fraud and procurement practices.
He said, “TETFund was created as an intervention fund, not the major funding. The universities belong to the Federal Government and government is supposed to fund them and states are supposed to fund their own.
“It’s an intervention fund but there are people who wants to have access to that money from the political circle, from the bureaucratic circle, at all cost. We are struggling with that,” he added.
According to the president of ASUU, a framework should be established to include all relevant parties in the process of allocating and using funds in an open and transparent manner.
He said, “There should be stakeholders’ meeting to assess what you want to do with the funds.”
“You see today where somebody comes from the TETFund and say, ‘I have a project for you and I am going to be the contractor. We want an open project.”
“Every university council should be allowed to run their projects with the stakeholders involved.”
Speaking further, Osodeke said ASUU is proud of fighting for the interest of the common man whose children won’t enjoy a university education but for the agitation of ASUU.
He said if not for the struggles of ASUU, there won’t be public universities in Nigeria any longer. “Any day we give up like others, our public universities will be gone,” he added.
Osodeke added that Federal Government officials are not interested in fixing the deplorable state of the tertiary education system in the country and not ready to grant the decade-old demands of ASUU.
