The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) said it has eliminated the use of vendors on its content component of intervention, which includes research grants, professional and academic staff training.
The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arch. Sonny Echono, who stated this in reaction to a report that the fund is awarding questionable contracts, described the report as misleading and misrepresentation of facts.
Speaking to journalists in Abuja, he said “There is a fundamental difference between the various forms of interventions we have, where we do infrastructure projects, are procuring tools, equipment for lab or other equipment or where we are procuring consultancy services, we use the contracts system because that is the most suitable way of getting those services.”
The TETFund boss said the Fund no longer does what the public service calls “Nyanya training, where you go and look for vendors and source for a resource person and look for space in one hotel and people will go and drink tea and go away.”
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He said, “We do serious academic and professional training; we sponsor people for post doc, bench work and academic degree in masters and PhD and certification in ICT that will improve employability. These are opportunities we are offering to our students and academicians and for this, we have always adopted a memorandum of understanding and the difference is very clear.
“We have eliminated the era when people visit the fund with portfolio seeking for contracts, we made enemies in the process and some people are not happy and some people want to restore old order because they feel that is what is beneficial but we are very pleased that we are able to save billions for our people and systems.
He said since 2016 and having arrived at the Fund in 2022, they have been employing MOU for academic and professional content including ICT.
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