Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund, Sonny Echono, in this interview with GRACE EDEMA speaks about abandoned projects in universities across the nation, electricity challenges and reasons TETFund cannot fund private universities
What are your views on universities in the country paying heavily for electricity?
It is a very difficult position they find themselves, because first and foremost, we’ve had reduced allocations for our institutions from the federal budget due to competing needs. So you find that within the constraint of maximum of 10 per cent allocated for overheads, this has been reducing significantly. You find a situation now where some universities get N200m, N300m for a year for the whole overheads, yet in one month, the cost of electricity is exceeding that, so it’s almost impossible. A few universities try to subsidise this through their Internally Generated Revenue, those that are in good locations and can sell products but there are others that even by virtue of their location and the offerings that they have, they are unable to generate that type of resource to be able to pay such a competitive energy bill. So we are trying to see how we can help them provide alternative energy sources that will complement their existing supplies and guarantee that teaching and learning can continue.
Talking about these alternatives, how soon, and what is the percentage that is likely to cut off from their bills?
Currently as we speak, even this year, between now and December, five of our universities are going to have the benefit of having alternative energy projects commissioned on their campuses, including Maiduguri, Calabar, Abeokuta, Abuja, and one or two others. This effort has been going on, it started with the government appropriation, then there was a World Bank facility that was used for the second phase. The ongoing third phase, which is now being rounded up, came from a facility from the African Development Bank, which is led by a Nigerian, you know that. So, it made that fund available and schools are benefiting. We are continuing, we don’t want the fund to dry up. The President has also created a particular energy fund that will also take part of this challenge but because the investments are huge, we are doing them in phases. TETFund is looking at doing about 12 institutions under our 2025 intervention guidelines and we will continue to upscale these on a phase basis based on the resources available to the fund going forward. But as we’re taking them off the grid, in some of the institutions, even what we generate is more than what they need so they’re getting licenses now, to be able to sell the excess power they’re generating to other users so that they can get some revenue.
So do you have an idea of what percentage it might cut off from their bills?
In some institutions, they are even removing themselves completely from the grid. It will be almost like 100 per cent but in others, it will be supplementary. It depends on the load factor. How much energy do you need? How much can you generate on your own? We are also encouraging them through their own researches and other ventures that they are going into, to have at least some element of their energy, to have energy mix so that some are generated by them, and some can come from the public domain. But we are seeing across the board, we are working towards starting with 50 and progressively increasing that percentage.
What about the electricity challenge?
First, the issue of demand, we are trying to encourage our institutions to be more conscious to our students, to sensitise them on the use for energy conservation and how not to waste power. We are addressing issues around the efficiency of the distribution system. For some of them, it’s not even the tariff that is the biggest challenge, the fact that they don’t get enough power and they’re having to buy diesel, and they’re also exhibiting cars to on generators, that’s also another challenge and we are trying to see how we can reduce that dependence so that we can get some efficiency in use. Then gradually, we are also encouraging our buildings, as we said, to be energy efficient for the new structures we are providing, we are giving them alternative energy so that they don’t need to go back. We are not increasing the load demand of our institutions as they grow.
Let’s now talk about structures. Why do we have abandoned TETFund projects in educational institutions and what solutions are you providing?
There are so many issues that are responsible for projects being abandoned. First, it could be poor packaging. Two, it could be poor management of the projects, inadequate supervision, contractual issues between the contract and the institution, such as delayed payments or instructions not given on time. It may even be community issues around interfering with the construction work, and so on and so forth, but other factors will also lead to that. For most of the projects under the regular budget, the big problem is irregular and inadequate funding. You start the project, you provide some funding this year, next year you don’t fund it and you contractually stop work, and then as you keep waiting to get additional money, part of the project will deteriorate, price of building materials go up, you are required to review it, and so on. There are so many factors that are responsible. But the best practice is to ensure that we package projects, and first complete all your engineering design because sometimes we just do our work based on sketch design. Then you go to a site, you now realise that the soil condition is different, you need to do raft or pipe instead of what you’ve done, isolated columns you’ve designed, and so on and so forth. We encourage people to do their packaging separately and to do it adequately before they go into design to select competent, qualified contractors, get professionals to supervise your work for you so they can deliver on the quality standards and all that you are looking for, in terms of workmanship, in terms of quality of building materials and so on and so forth. Then ensure that you pay contractors as they become due, because sometimes these are literary tactics, corruption and all that also contribute to projects not being completed. While we quarrel with imposing contractors or contractors who are not competent being given jobs, the other aspect is even when a good contractor is on site and you frustrate him, the project will never be delivered on time. Those are part of the reasons responsible but as I said, we have created a new dedicated line for completion of abandoned projects, and we don’t used to have that before because the challenge with that one project is that the cost is fixed. We do not until now, I encourage it in the same way anything happens even externally to the project, because the contract is fixed, you are not able to fund it, and the contractor will abandon it if the price is significant and cannot complete it within the money available. So we’ve made our progress now following international standards. The big projects are no longer fixed, but projects that can be completed within one year, we fix them.
These abandoned site fund projects here and there, what’s going to happen to them?
I told you we have created a dedicated intervention line, and we are completing them in phases. So, we started doing that last year, and many of them are coming on board now being completed. So in the next two years, we want to phase them out, we want to complete all of them, because we are prioritising them over new projects where a school have many abandoned projects. We tell you, go and review all your contracts and bring it. Let’s finish this one first before we take a new one.
How would you rate the investment in capacity building from TETFund over the years?
We have been doing a lot in capacity building, but the returns have not been as rewarding as we would expect and also we are having to rethink it, because some schools don’t even need the capacity building we are providing, for example, the University of Ibadan and other institutions. If you go to the University of Ibadan, all their lecturers have PhDs, minimum. There is no lecturer in the University of Ibadan that has a Masters. So, having the programme to train Masters and PhD does not mean anything to them. If you give it to them, you are forcing them to do second PhD, second this and all of that. So, we are refocusing such funds to areas of postdoc or research or things that are related to honing their skills, their professional and academic skills, not necessarily getting qualifications. We are also using some of those to provide facilities within their campuses for research and for development.
So there wouldn’t be issues of people having to travel out?
We are minimising because it has been a major source of problem for us. And the costs have become prohibitive. The cost of flight tickets is high. Due to exchange rates, tuition is high. So, you are spending N100m or N120m on one person, when if you do it at home, that amount can train more than 15 people. So we don’t have such resources to waste. Moreover, there is a very high risk, almost 50 per cent of them who go there now don’t want to come back. So, you have just wasted their money and wasted the time of the students who are waiting for him to bring the knowledge to come and impart on them, so we are refocusing our training locally.
Can you talk about the particular figure likely to be spent on one person in the UK and US?
Today, as I’m speaking to you, depending on the cost, training in the UK and the US, the minimum you can do in the UK now is N85m to N90m. In the US, it’s about N100m to N110m minimum. I’m not discussing Harvard or Yale or Oxford or Cambridge. I’m talking about the medium level institutions. You can imagine, all of that will go to one person because of exchange rate. Even tickets to travel now is very expensive. Upkeep is very expensive because you have to translate it into this high exchange rate. One pound is over N3,000, and in the UK, I believe we pay £1,000 or £1,200 every month. Multiply that.
Private universities are always clamouring that TETFund should also fund them because they are also training Nigerian citizens. What do you have to say about this?
They are not training Nigerian citizens at the cost that public universities are. If we have to fund their infrastructure, we would also begin to tell them how much they can charge as school fees. Since we cannot do that, public funds cannot be used for their investment in infrastructure. I’m emphasising infrastructure. However, there are so much collaborations we do with them. They are allowed to participate in all our research programs. They are members of our academic and scientific committees. They contribute when they write books, we sponsor those books because those are the things that we say have bearing on Nigerian students. Even the TERA we talked about, we are going to open it to private students because it is the students that are our primary constituents, not their lecturers.
The lecturers are paid by the proprietors. In other countries, the origin of this academic training is because when we expanded our tertiary institution, we didn’t have the manpower to support it. So, we did it as an incentive, otherwise, nobody hires somebody and then he becomes your child, and you start training him instead of him delivering the service that you hired him for. Over time too, we may be scaling down the whole idea of it because if you need somebody with a PhD, hire a PhD, if you need a professor, hire a professor, rather than go and hire somebody with a BSc, then in the next six years, you are busy training him, he’s not working for you, you are paying him a salary and you are also paying his school fees.
Let’s talk about the TERAS programme, what is it about?
It is a platform we have created as part of the response to the global shift in curriculum in our institution. We know that we cannot have enough classrooms for all the people who demand tertiary education and we don’t have enough teachers. So by leveraging on technology, you now have learning management systems. Even when students need a disruption, all the lecturers are on board it’s like online teaching, it’s a hybrid mode of teaching. Any lecturer that is given a lecture in the classroom is required to put that same lecture, whether it is video, whether it is in text, whether it is in picture or audio, on the platform. So if you miss the lecture, some of our classes are overcrowded, we have 1,000 people, and nobody is even hearing or listening. We have abolished the concept of handouts. Nobody does handouts anymore. You have to put that same thing you call handouts on the platform. All the researches, all the articles being written, all the thesis that are done in all our universities, they are on the platform. So you digitise them, so you will avoid copying. If you do the anti-plagiarism checkup, it will catch you. So it improves the quality of theses. It will also expose our literary works to a larger audience so that they can cite them and they will get credit for all the things.
And it’s effective from when?
It’s already activated. We are now, onboarding our students. That’s why we have about 2.7 million on it already. But we want to get to five million.