Date: 2020-12-07

Management of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETfund) has said that the federal government agency will not extend its interventions in public tertiary institutions in the country to private ones.

Speaking with journalists in Ilorin at the weekend after an assessment tour of TETfund projects at University of Ilorin (UNILORIN), the chairman of the TETfund Board of Trustees (BoT), Kashim Imam, said that the agency is determined to prove that public agencies can actually work and do so with integrity.

"TETfund is doing absolutely nothing to capture private tertiary institutions in our scheme of things. It is enough that we are impacting on public tertiary institutions.

At the moment we have more than 226 state and federal universities, polytechnics and colleges of education that we are funding.

"We want to fund them to the extent that they can compete and even do better than the private universities. This is our objective. We have no business funding private tertiary institutions. I don't subscribe to it. I don't support it and I will not be a party to it.

'It is just enough for us to impact on the public tertiary institutions owned by the state and federal governments. This covers universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.

Private universities are established by private investors to make money. So it is not our responsibility to find private universities.

"The 226 tertiary institutions accessing TETfund fund are very significant numbers. The institutions are evenly spread across all the six geo-political zones of the country. Not only that we fund all these institutions equally regardless of whether they are owned by the state or federal governments and we will do more, "he said.

In a remark, UNILORIN Vice Chancellor, Professor Sulyman AbdulKareem, expressed happiness to TETfund for its interventions in the institution.

"I feel good because there is nothing like showing people the help they have done to you. This university has benefitted enough over the years, from TEDFUND. Like I said if you take the intervention of TETfund from our campus we have not much to say it. We thank God for them and we pray that they will do more for us," Prof AbdulKareem added.