The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has called on the National Assembly to prevent what it describes as the “tactical abrogation” of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) under the proposed tax bill currently before lawmakers.
ASUU President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, raised the concern during a public hearing on the 2024 tax bill, organized as part of the legislative process for enacting the new tax law.
According to Osodeke, ASUU is deeply troubled by provisions in the bill that propose diverting the Education Tax, also known as the Development Levy, from funding TETFund’s programs to the newly established Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFund). He warned that such a move could jeopardize the funding of critical academic infrastructure and research initiatives in tertiary institutions across the country.
ASUU has urged lawmakers to reconsider the bill’s implications on higher education funding, emphasizing the need to sustain TETFund’s role in advancing Nigeria’s university system.
He said the bill is proposing that as of 2030, TETFUND will receive zero allocation from the development levy.
He said TETFUND, since its inception in 1992 has been instrumental for most of the development in the tertiary institutions in the country, a model that has attracted the country’s attention.
He referred to Section 59(3) of the Nigeria Tax Bill (NTB) 2024, which stated that only 50 per cent of the Development Levy will be made available to TETFund in 2025 and 2026, respectively, while NITDA, NASENI, and NELFund would share the remaining percentages, respectively.
“TETFund will also receive 66.7 per cent in 2027, 2028 and 2029 years of assessment, respectively, but zero per cent in the 2030 year of assessment and thereafter. This simply means that from 2030, all funds generated from the Development Levy would be passed to NELFund.”
He said ASUU finds this development not only worrisome but also inimical to our national development objective. We are deeply concerned about the fate of TETFund because it is a positive testament to our constructive engagements with Nigerian governments since 1992.
“It is our considered view that abrogating the TETFund Act 2011, by design or default, will be a great disservice not just to education but to Nigeria as a nation. TETFund has been the backbone for infrastructural development, postgraduate training and research capacity building in Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions in the last one and a half decades.
“Over 90 per cent of capital projects in state and federal colleges of education, Polytechnics and universities during this period were TETFund-sponsored. The intervention agency has also remained the primary source of higher degree training for young academics and support staff since 2011 when the Act establishing the Education Tax Fund (ETF) was re-oriented to its original intendment of an intervention agency for the development of tertiary institutions in Nigeria.”
The ASUU President insisted that taking any percentage out of the Education Tax (Development Levy) to service another agency not known to the TETFund Act 2011 is illegal and should not be allowed to stand, and also giving zero allocation of Development Levy to TETFund as of 2030 is a technical way of abrogating the agency.
He described the planned replacement of TETFund with NELFund as killing a parent to keep a newborn child alive, which is unethical and against the principle of natural justice.
He added: “The impact of TETFund on the campus of every tertiary institution in Nigeria is beyond description, thus abrogating it will take public tertiary education many years back and undermine the modest gains in repositioning Nigerian universities for global reckoning and transformative development.”
Also, annual supports given to tertiary institutions by TETFund have substantially reduced industrial crises in many tertiary institutions; renovation of old facilities and provision of new ones and opportunities for staff development leading to career advancement have doused labour-related agitations on our campuses.
He insisted that TETFund impacts not only tertiary-level education but also the secondary down to kindergarten because it directly and/or indirectly supports the production of quality teachers and different categories of support staff in the entire educational system.
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