The Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Sonny Echono, has explained why the agency suspended its foreign scholarship programme for lecturers in public tertiary institutions.
Echono said the scholarship programme for lecturers was discontinued because it had become financially unsustainable, citing high foreign exchange rates and the growing number of beneficiaries who failed to return to Nigeria after completing their studies abroad.
Speaking in an interview with TheCable, he revealed that in some cases, TETFund spent nearly N100 million on a single scholar, especially when converted from currencies like pounds and dollars.
“It’s a cost-benefit analysis. We are faced with two challenges. The first is the exchange rate differential.
“We have a situation where, because of the sharp drop in the value of the local currency, we have to provide a lot of naira cover to train a single scholar,” he said.
“In some institutions, we are getting close to 100 million for one person when you convert from pounds to naira. So, cost was a major factor, because we pay in dollars, pounds, euros, and other foreign currencies.
“The second part is that many of the beneficiaries were not being kind to the country.
“They make us sponsor them, and when they finish their programmes, they refuse to come back.
“Meanwhile, the school will be waiting for them here, expecting that they will return to impart the students.
Describing the situation as a “double tragedy,” Echono noted that while lecturers enjoyed full sponsorship abroad, their institutions in Nigeria continued paying them, expecting them to return.
“So, it’s a double tragedy for the institution that released them. And while they are on scholarships, they are still receiving salaries from their institutions back home.
“We are not stopping you from going abroad to look for greener pastures, but not under false pretences. Not by defrauding the government, as it were.
“And it was happening in huge numbers. We tried to look at ways of trying to collaborating with the training institutions to curtail this. But they found various ways of going underground for a while, or changing from one country to the other.
“So, we felt that it was no longer sustainable — the high costs and rate of abscondment,” he said.
However, Echono clarified that the suspension is not absolute. He said waivers are still granted in exceptional cases where the course of study is not available in any Nigerian university.
He continued, “The bridge we’ve created is that we are now allowing for some exceptions — in very exceptional cases — where the courses of study are not available locally. So, we give exemptions. It’s not an absolute suspension.
“We have granted waivers. For example, the aviation university — we just gave them a waiver less than two weeks ago because some of the specific courses are new and not available in the country.
“So, for those, based on their merits, relevance to the national economy, and the fact that they are desirable for the institution, we grant those waivers.”
Echono added that the Fund decided to redirect resources to support local training of academic staff, which he described as more cost-effective and impactful.
“The majority of our scholars used to be from here. We have a local component, and we have the foreign component. So the local component has now received a boost because we have not reduced our funding for academic staff training; instead, we have increased it,” he said.
“We are training more people now. And the numbers will increase further because for each person you send abroad, you can train between eight to ten locally for the same amount.”
TETFund suspended the foreign scholarship programme in November 2024.
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