ASUU To FG, Don't Eliminate TETFUND Using New Tax Administration Bill
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has criticised President Bola Tinubu’s agenda to eliminate TETFUND under the tax administration bill.
Ayo Akinwole, the chairman of ASUU, University of Ibadan Chapter in a new year message, said such policy will kill the little infrastructural funding which TETFUND has been executing from 2030.
He said: “This misbegotten policy will have huge and adverse implications for the university system in Nigeria.
" This is, no doubt, an attempt to destroy the major source of infrastructural funding for already struggling public tertiary institutions.
" It is also an attempt to commodify university education in Nigeria. A part of the tax administration bill proposes eliminating the education tax, to be replaced by a “development levy”.
“This would effectively disrupt the revenue stream of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), an agency set up as a product of the ingenuity and struggles of ASUU, that has been the major source of funding for infrastructure development in many public tertiary institutions over the last decade.
"Since its establishment in 2011, TETFund has monitored the disbursement of education tax to public tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
"However, with this new bill, only 50 percent of the monies accruing to the levy would go to TETFund in 2025 and 2026. TETFund’s share will be upped to 66 percent in 2027, 2028, and 2029."
According to him, then, the agency would cease to get any revenue from 2030. From 2030, the development levy will be solely meant to fund the federal government’s student loan scheme. What this means is that the agency that funds infrastructural development in the Nigerian tertiary institutions is under the threat of extinction by 2030.”
“It is a public hazard to conscript academics into endless struggle for survival. There is low level of motivation and increasing rate of flight from the present condition at the slightest opportunity.”
