The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) said it has spent N168 billion on education projects under the Special High Impact Allocation.
Its Executive Secretary, Dr. Abdullahi Baffa, said the money was given to 12 universities, six polytechnics and six colleges of education.
Baffa, who spoke with reporters in an interview in Abuja, said the intervention was never suspended as being claimed.
He said: โWe are spending about N36 billion on that aside the over N132 billion already spent on Special High Impact Project before now, making over N168 billion.
โThese projects have all sprung up across the beneficiary institutions landscape and we are happy to say that we have thousands of projects all over our 202 beneficiary institutions that are ongoing at the moment.
โQuite a number of them have been completed; a number of them I have commissioned already and a number are on the queue waiting to be commissioned. We are pleased with the progress we have made in this aspect of our intervention activity.โ
Baffa said he met corruption and impunity in the awards and execution of intervention projects by contractors when he took over.
This, he said, made him to suspend projects under special intervention.
The TETFund boss said the agency saved N78 billion from special intervention allocations from which money had not been paid.
His words: โWhen we came, the house was almost upside down. Upside down in the sense that we met an agency where the primary purpose of establishing the agency, which is to intervene in specific areas regarding investments and financing was relegated to the background.
โThe Annual Direct Disbursement (ADD) for the year 2015 allocation was only 20 per cent of the total allocation for that year, while Special Intervention, which is discretionally, was 80 per cent of the allocation for that year! That is a recipe for corruption; that is a recipe for impunity; that is a recipe for fraud.โ
He added: โAgainst this background, what we first did was to suspend projects under Special Intervention. For all the Special Intervention allocation for the Year 2014 and year 2015 for which money had been disbursed already, we approved that they continued but ensured that they were done in accordance with the approval given.
โHowever, all other allocations and discretionary allocations for which TETFund has paid no money were cancelled. Interestingly, we made good savings of about N78 billion from that cancellation.
โWe plowed that money into the year 2016 allocation, and we were able to pursue the completion of those special projects as approved in the Approval-in-Principle and as approved in the Bill of Quantities for which the institutions and the vendors have agreed.
He said the agency was focused on increasing its direct disbursement to tertiary institutions as against increasing its interventions.
โWe just realised that we should invest more in the core mandate of TETFund in the annual direct disbursement rather than spending more on the discretionary projects under the Special Intervention.
โAs a result, we were able to allocate over a billion naira each to all the Federal and State universities, precisely, N1,009,000,000 and close to N700,000,000 each to all the Federal and state polytechnics, and another N700,000,000 each to all the Colleges of Education owned by Federal and state governments,โ he added.
