By Gami Tadanyigbe
The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has called on the National Assembly to do all within its capacity to protect the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, from being abrogated under the Nigeria Tax Bill 2024.
The union said it was deeply concerned about TETFund because the agency remained a positive testament to its constructive engagements with Nigerian governments since 1992.
insisted that it was its considered view that abrogating the TETFund Act 2011, by design or default, would be a great disservice not just to education but also to Nigeria as a nation.
The association’s position was contained in a presentation by its president, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, on the second day of the public hearing organised by the National Assembly on Tax Reform Bills in Abuja, yesterday.
In the presentation, titled “Debates on the Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024: Our Case for Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund,“ ASUU said it was worried over the proposed abrogation of education tax which, it claimed posed serious threats to the survival of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund.
The presentation read: “The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has monitored with keen interest the debates about review of the tax system in the country, as proposed by the Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024, which is currently before the National Assembly.
“Of particular interest to our union is the proposed abrogation of education tax which poses serious threats to the survival of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund,TETFund.
“From any objective assessment, 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-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.
ASUU is seriously worried that the education tax, called development levy, used to bankroll TETFund’s programmes, is about to be ceded to the newly established Nigerian Education Loan Fund, NELFUND.
“Section 59(3) of the Nigeria Tax Bill (NTB) 2024 states that only 50% of the development levy would be made available to TETFund in 2025 and 2026, while NITDA, NISENI, and NELFUND would share the remaining percentages.
‘’TETFund will also receive 66.7% in 2027, 2028 and 2029 years of assessment but zero per cent in 2030 year of assessment and, thereafter, from 2030, all funds generated from the development levy will be passed to NELFUND!
“With all sense of responsibility, ASUU finds this development not only worrisome but also inimical to our national development objective.”
ASUU said its position was predicated on a number of reasons, which include the following: “Taking any percentage out of education tax (development levy) to service another agency not known to the TETFund Act 2011 is illegal and should not be allowed to stand.
“Giving zero allocation of development levy to TETFund as from 2030 is a technical way of abrogating the agency; the purported admonishment that TETFund should seek innovative ways of generating its funds is spurious and ill-advised because as a creation of an Act, the institution dies without the fund.
“Replacing TETFund with NELFUND is comparable to killing a parent to keep a newborn child alive; it is unethical and against the principle of natural justice.
“The impact of TETFund on the campus of every tertiary institution in Nigeria is beyond description; 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.