The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has said part of the reforms it carried out was to eliminate the use of vendors and contracts in its academic and professional staff training interventions.
The agency said contracts were no longer used for its content-based interventions except in infrastructural projects where the procurement of goods, tools, laboratory equipment and others are needed.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, stated this during an interview with newsmen on the sidelines of the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU) in Abuja.
Echono’s response came on the heels of allegations by an online news medium that TETFund awarded N7.6 billion questionable contracts within two months, alleging that the agency acted outside its mandate in carrying out capacity building programmes in its beneficiary institutions.
But the TETFund boss took time to explain that the agency has been leveraging on Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) to carry out its academic and professional staff training since 2016.
Echono said: “We do not use contracts, we have eliminated the use of vendors; we do serious academic and professional training.
“We sponsor people for postdoc, for bench work, or even academic degrees: masters and PhDs, and for professionals proficiencies and certification in ICT that will improve employability.
“So when detractors try to say things like these, they’re calling it contracts, because they are trying to criminalise when they knew for example, that contracts you cannot pay more than 30% as advanced payments.”
