Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, in Nigeria intends to create 12 centres of excellence and allocate N1 billion to each next year.
Chairman, TETFund Board of Trustees, Alhaji Kashim Imam speaking at a two-day capacity building workshop for heads of beneficiary institutions and staffers of TETFund centres of excellence, in Abuja, pledged to add six state universities and six Polytechnics to the centres, saying 70 per cent of the funds will be for research funding.
This is as the Board of Trustees of TETFund has raised the national research fund from N7.5 billion to N8.5 billion ias well as N5 billion special intervention to the University of Lagos, UNILAG its 2021 budget.
Imam said the intervention to UNILAG, which was on the orders of President Muhammadu Buhari, was also carried out in University of Abuja in 2020.
He saw research as a prerequisite for national development, pointing out that no nation can develop without research.
The TETFUND boss described research as delicate balance for TETFund as it is invisible, adding that as a politician, development is counted in terms of physical infrastructures such as raids, and bridges, among others.
Imam noted that the fund has to strike a balance of funding physical infrastructures on one side, and funding research on the other hand.
On the academic development programme of the fund, he said the list of scholars sponsored by TETFund for PhDs and masters was incredible, warning that the institutions would only be half fulfilled if the country funds infrastructure without research and scholarships.
The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Prof Suleiman Bogoro, said the TETFund centres of excellence project is, at the first instance, a zonal tertiary education project designed to promote specialisation among participating universities within the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, STEM, Agriculture and Health areas, among others.
Bogoro said the project is geared towards addressing identified national development challenges, as well as strengthening the capacities of beneficiary universities to deliver high quality training and applied research.
“Within the 5-year gestation period of the TCOE Project, we await success stories and manifest achievements that will stretch the limits of our expectations.
“The R&D and innovation flame has been ignited in Nigeria, thanks to our modest efforts, but the future of this initiative and the possibility of the R&D flame developing into a raging inferno that transforms the research landscape in Nigeria rests squarely on your shoulders,” he charged the centers.
While urging them to ensure that the guidelines for the management of the centres were strictly adhered to, he noted that the guidelines as they will engender the success that will in due course, help to secure funds for them locally and internationally as the guidelines were crafted in line with globally acceptable standards.
He described universities as centres of research, stating that more should be invested into them as well as polytechnics and colleges of education.
While noting that next year, polytechnics will benefit in equal proportion with universities and subsequently colleges of education, he said universities must demonstrate academic leadership in grant, writing and avoid complacency.
He decried the poor quality of grant writing among Nigerian academics, stating that the fund has encountered grants that are not unreadable grant proposals submitted to it.
Earlier, the Director of R&D and TETFund Centres of Excellence, Salihu Bakare, had said TETFund’s international profile has risen significantly as other countries like Ghana and Tanzania have come to understudy it and implement their own versions back home.
Bakare said Nigerian universities must cease to be local universities, attract foreign students and compete favourably with any university in the world. He said before Bogoro’s appointment, no Nigerian university was ranked among the first 1000 universities in the world and less than 60 per cent of the university academics had PhDs.
He added that due to targeted interventions by the fund, the universities were now better ranked and more academics have Ph.Ds.
The director said one of the reasons the fund initiated the centres of excellence was to ensure that Nigeria is transformed into a knowledge-based economy.
“Until all Nigerian universities are transformed into centres of excellence that Nigeria can truly be transformed into a knowledge-based economy,” he posited.
