The Tertiary Education Trust Fund has engaged the National Association of Nigerian Students to monitor its projects in tertiary institutions across the country.
The Fund also pledged to improve students’ accommodation in institutions through Public Private Partnerships.
The Executive Secretary, TETFund, Sonny Echono, disclosed this while presenting a 30-seater bus to NANS in Abuja on Monday.
Echono said that the fund was also committed, through constant dialogue with NANS to meet students’ needs, noting that they are the centre of any policy on education.
“Education is about students and how to equip them with the right skills and knowledge to contribute to development.
“TETFund is consulting with them to find out their needs and with significant engagement, we want them to be our eyes in tertiary institutions.
“This is because when something is given on our campuses, we should have multiple aids for getting the information we want. We want to identify in each campus a contact person to confirm whether our intervention is yielding fruit,” he said.
The executive secretary said that the fund also had a similar engagement with staff unions to help monitor projects on campuses to harvest expectations.
He added that,
“The fund would continue to work with students to improve on students’ accommodations through Public Private Partnership and the private sector.”
Responding, the National President of NANS, Usman Barambu, commended the fund for donating the bus following their request to President Bola Tinubu a few weeks ago.
Barambu said that students don’t actually benefit directly from TETFund and so laid this particular complaint which had yielded results.
He assured the fund to put thorough checks on TETFund projects on campuses while also ensuring contractors carry out their assigned contracts dutifully.
“TETFund has been helpful to higher education. When we tabled our request with the president, we said to him that over 90 per cent of projects executed in tertiary institutions is done by TETFund.
“We will ensure we do our best to monitor the contractors in our campuses for proper monitoring of projects.
“There should also be a disciplinary measure put in place to sanction contractors that deviate from what they are supposed to do,” he said
