The President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, has slammed governors for establishing state universities they cannot fund.
He also alleged that most governors duplicate universities in their states to get a piece of the pie that is the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund.
Osodeke, who made the allegation in an interview on Channels Television’s ”The Morning Brief” programme yesterday, said: “Any governor today establishing a university is eyeing TETFund as a source of funding.”
He said though TETFund was established as an intervention fund for public universities, politicians and civil servants now saw it as a cash cow to be milked dry through shady procurement processes and contract fraud.
“TETFund was created as an intervention fund, not the major funding. The universities belong to the federal government and government is supposed to fund them and states are supposed to fund their own.
“It’s an intervention fund but there are people who want to have access to that money from the political circle, from the bureaucratic circle, at all cost. We are struggling with that,” he said.
The ASUU president said a structure should be created to carry stakeholders along in the process of how the money was allocated and spent in an open and transparent manner.
“There should be stakeholders’ meeting to assess what you want to do with the funds,” Prof Osodeke said.
He added that the stakeholders should include the university community; lecturers, student groups to put an end “to the case you see today where somebody comes from the TETFund and say, ‘I have a project for you and I am going to be the contractor. We want an open project.
“Every university council should be allowed to run its projects with the stakeholders’ involvement.”
