The Federal Government has threatened that the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) will defund non-performing Centres of Excellence.
Minister of Education, Prof Tahir Mamman, stated this in Abuja, at the weekend, while receiving two reports of TETFund’s ad-hoc committees on Assessment/Review of TETFund Centres of Excellence and Operationalisation of Skills Development Special Intervention.
Mamman said the government would not continue to reward indolence by giving free money to institutions that were not doing what they were supposed to do.
The Guardian reports that the Federal Government established 27 Centers of Excellence eight years ago to churn out top-notch innovations and professionals for the country’s development. However, some of their performances have been reportedly subpar.
He said: “The government is encouraging our scholars to simply rise to the occasion and deliver on their scholarship what world-class scholars do, and we are not going to reward indolence. We can’t be giving free money to institutions that are not doing what they are supposed to do.
“In terms of the skilling, we want to raise the equipment level of those institutions, polytechnic and others; so that they can provide all the skillset we need in Nigeria in the highest quality that can serve domestic and international markets.”
At the event, TETFund Executive Secretary, Sonny Echono, also said the fund would not continue to throw money at centres that are not living up to expectations.
According to him, some centres have funds with TETFund that they have not accessed since inception.
“The funds are with us because we will not release them until you reach a milestone. But while they have delayed in reaching those milestones are causes of concerns,” he said.
The TETFund boss noted that the strategy for establishing centres of excellence was good because TETFund realised that it did not have enough resources to improve all the facilities of all public institutions at the same time.
“The idea was to incubate, to have one centre, the right equipment, the right tools, the right faculty and experts that would lead our efforts in research and in promoting scholarship at the highest level so that they can also inspire other centres,” he said.
Earlier, the Committee on the Assessment/Review of TETFund Centres of Excellence, led by Prof Oyewale Tomori, in its report, had declined to recommend any centre for upgrade.
The report noted that most centres did not utilise their first seed grant of N150 million for the initial infrastructure required in the centres, and advised the fund to provide some bailout funds to the centres to enable their proper take-off.
The committee also urged the fund to ensure that all funds for the centres of excellence were disbursed directly to their accounts.