The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) has hinted on plans to suspend foreign scholarships for Nigerian students for at least two years due to high exchange rate.
The fund’s executive secretary, Sonny Echono, disclosed this at a public hearing organized by an adhoc committee of the House of Representatives on the alleged missing N2.3 trillion in TETFUND.
Politics Nigeria recalls that the House established a committee to investigate the alleged misuse of N2.3 trillion generated from the Tertiary Education Tax by TETFUND from 2011 to 2023.
Mr. Echono explained that TETFUND is facing difficulties in accessing foreign exchange from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), even though their tax proceeds are generated by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).
According to the Fund, the CBN always insists it sourced its forex to pay fees for scholars abroad.
Echono, urged the panel to intervene on TETFUND’s behalf, disclosing that the Fund would resort to local institutions for scholarship trainings.
“We operate a system where our forex is being sold on our behalf at an official rate and we apply like anybody else to get it, sometimes it leads to additional cost,” Echono said.
“Currently, as I speak, we are in consultations with all our stakeholders to suspend foreign training for a year or two. This is because of the recent exchange rate adjustments, we are unable to continue based on our disbursement guideline.
“The money we allocated in naira cannot cover the dollar requirement for training. Those who are currently there, we now need more naira to pay for the dollar that is required for their annual fees. We are trying to put a hold.
“Most of our training now will be done locally through our experienced, first-generation universities and other specialized universities based here. This way we can retain our resources in house and cope with the change of foreign exchange variation.
“Some of the scholars that have been sponsored, unpatriotically when they go, they enjoy our scholarship, acquire a higher degree, they refuse to come back, it has become a major crisis.
“We are working with the staff unions for stringent and effective measures to be taken; currently before you are sponsored, you are made to sign a bond.
“The scholarship requires that you will come back. It is required that you have a guarantor and in many cases the guarantor has suffered undue hardship because when you disappear, we hold the guarantor to pay all the money expended on your behalf but that has not been effective.
“We believe that a system where we work with our embassies and the institutions, we can enforce the repayment for those who insist they will not come back
“If they don’t, we will declare them ‘persona non grata’. We will write to the embassies and they will make it available to those countries and they will not be able to get jobs. They will be seen as fugitives of law from their countries.
“We may have to take that hard stand because the numbers are alarming. We just checked about 40 institutions and over 137 absconders and the review is ongoing.
“It is a huge number that we cannot afford and so we will be seeking your support to strengthen some of the existing regulations to ensure that those who benefit from this programme must come back.
“We are not against people looking for greener pastures but do so on your own, not through our scholarship or through our sponsorship”.
Speaking on the alleged missing N2.3 trillion in TETFUND, Echono said the allegations were unfounded.
According to him, the actual sum generated from education tax from 2011 to 2022 was N2.476 trillion out of which the FIRS retained N99 billion as cost of collection.
He said that the government had since borrowed N371.3 billion from the Fund out of which it has paid N48 billion so far.
