The House of Representatives Committee on Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) has queried the agency’s executive secretary over the slow process of accessing funds by tertiary institutions in the country.

Miriam Onuoha, the committee chairman, said this during the agency’s oversight function in Abuja on Thursday.

Ms Onuoha said, “Why do we have a preponderance of assessing funds by most of these institutions?”.

She added that the committee frowns at situations where funds meant for tertiary institutions were not accessed by those they were meant for.

The lawmaker urged state governors to use their instrumentality of office to ensure that heads of institutions comply with TETFund on accessed funds.

Speaking on the purpose of the oversight, Ms Onuoha said it was meant to see how the agency had performed in the 2022–2023 budget, in line with the budgetary provision.

Ms Onuoha noted that, in line with its function, the committee must ensure that allocations made to TETFund are used judiciously.

The executive secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, Sonny Echono, commended Ms Onuoha for summoning commercial bank executives to intervene in the payment of education tax.

He said there had been a rise in education tax collection from 2.5 per cent to three per cent, which has to do with the efficiency of collection.

Mr Echono said the collection from education tax in 2020 was N257 billion, and by 2021, the fund received a sharp decline in the tax collection of N185.5 billion.

He added that the collection rose to 328.8 billion in 2022 and 725 billion in 2023, respectively.

Mr Echono added that Nigeria was not doing well in research grants before now. He, however, added that efforts had been made, and Nigeria had now moved from the 9th position to the 7th position in the African research grant.

He lamented that the high exchange rate had reduced the number of scholars the fund trained in its interventions.

Mr Echoni said remittances to scholars in the past were not too good, saying, “Many of the institutions came back to us saying that it takes a lot of processes to get money from the Central Bank.”

“But we now pay directly to the institution as part of our intervention. So, CBN now transfers in bulk to different institutions for those scholars.

“We have taken care of 1500 scholars with a total of N3.8 billion extended. We identify a cut-off point for those eligible for the scholarship,” he stated.

(NAN)