The Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Prof. Suleiman Bogoro, says only public tertiary institutions benefit from TETFund’s intervention because majority of Nigerian students are in public institutions.

Bogoro gave the explanation on Wednesday in Abuja when Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina State, paid him a courtesy visit.

According to Bogoro, if the trend of admission changes in the future, government may consider a change in the policy.

“The ETF Act amended four years ago focused on public tertiary institutions; monotechnics have been removed as well as other institutions that do not fit in.

“The fund is limited to public tertiary institutions because majority of our children, in fact more than 90 per cent of them are in public tertiary institutions.

“That informed the wisdom to limit the intervention to public tertiary institutions.

“If it changes in the future, we will look at it but for now we are ready to partner with state governments that establish higher institutions,” he said.

Prof. Bogoro said that aside massive infrastructural development in public tertiary institutions much was going on in staff development and research.

According to him, the TEFFund’s interventions have saved many public institutions from infrastructural collapse.

“We have two funds – the National Research Fund with a limit of N50 million per research grant and the Institution Based Research with a limit of N2 million where more staff access it.

“Four years ago, TETFund decided to expand the horizon of intervention to include content development – academic staff training for Masters and PhD locally and outside this country

“Today, we have trained over 12,000 and over 7,000 have returned with their certificates and most of these are PhDs.

“We have also revived over 150 professional journals and every year staff of universities are sponsored for international conferences for capacity building,” he said.

Earlier, Masari, commended TETFund for giving a lifeline to the public tertiary institutions in the country.

He said that tertiary institutions in Kastina state needed more intervention as the State was poor.

Masari said that there was serious dearth of English language and Mathematics teachers in the Kastina schools, hence the need to revive its college of education.

He said: “We have a young university; we have a polytechnic and a college of education which all needed TETFund’s intervention.

“We appeal to TETFund to focus more on our college of education to produce teachers for English and mathematics.

“If we can get TETFund to take the pressure off our shoulders in terms of providing infrastructure for our higher institutions, we can then focus on basic education which is the foundation of education.”

The governor said that the decision to limit TETFund’s intervention to public tertiary institutions was laudable as it was a huge task to intervene in public tertiary institutions across the 36 states.

He promised to restore the state lost glory in terms of education. (NAN)

•Photo shows Prof. Bogoro.