30,000 academic staff benefit from TETFund training — chairman

Over 30,000 academic staff in public tertiary institutions across Nigeria have benefited from training sponsored by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) within and outside Nigeria from 2008 to date.

Chairman of board of trustees of TETFund, Kashim Imam, disclosed this while speaking with newsmen on Friday in Maiduguri. Imam said the fund also sponsored 68,000 academic and non-academic staff to various conferences during the period under review.

Imam, who led a delegation of TETFund officials on assessment of Academic Staff Training and Development in tertiary institutions in Borno and Yobe States lauded staff from institutions in the two states for returning to their respective institutions to impact knowledge after foreign studies.

Imam, who observed that there were incidents of some staff from institutions in few states absconding after studies abroad, said he was impressed to see that there was no single case of absconding in the frontline states of Borno and Yobe.

Also speaking, some of the lecturers who benefited from TETFund scholarship lauded the fund interventions which they said remain the lifeline of survival for public tertiary institutions in the country.

The vice-chancellor of University of Maiduguri, Aliyu Shugaba and his counterpart of Yobe State University, Mala Daura, said without TETFund, most public institutions would have been reduced to glorified secondary schools.

Sabo Sale, a lecturer in Yobe State University, Mustafa Isa of University of Maiduguri and Tijjani Yahaya of Ramat Polytechnic, said they remain grateful to TETFund for giving them opportunities to upgrade their knowledge.

During the assessment visit, the TETFund team interacted with scholars who benefited from its support on their successes and challenges as well as gave advice on how to maximise the fund interventions.