Amid the nation’s public universities’ shutdown because of lecturers’ strike, President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the 2022 disbursement proposals and guidelines for public higher institutions.

The Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Sunday Echono, disclosed this while receiving the Committee of Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (CVCNU) in Abuja on Thursday.

The money was approved amid the ongoing strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

Echono said the meeting of all beneficiary institutions would be held by next week to interact further and brief on the proposed reforms that have been approved for implementation.

He assured the vice chancellors of TeFund’s commitment to sustain the ongoing reforms in the sector, with increased emphasis on the content of its interventions particularly in the areas of research, ICT and in the areas of encouraging a reading culture in our society through publication of books.

“We are confident that once this is accomplished it will not only provide open learning resources for researchers and students who want to access previous works done in their respective areas of research but also promote a culture of academic excellence,” he said.

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Echono noted that one of the problems of Nigeria’s education is the quality of graduates, particularly the quality of thesis, saying, “Many students plagiarize peoples work”.

“We believe in anti-plagiarism device as you have developed will go a long way in dictating this and ensuring compliance. Indeed, we have adopted a policy in TETFund that going forward, all proposals coming to us must go through your system and receive certification that it has passed a minimum standard that is required and for all publishers and authors before it can benefit from our support.”

He also lamented the amount of resources being spent on sending children abroad for studies, urging universities, especially private ones to create a niche and compete with foreign universities that are attracting students in order to save cost.

Earlier, the chairman of the CVC, Prof Samuel Gowon Edoumiekumo, said the CVCNU was working closely with the TetFund to deploy the thesis digitisation for Nigerian tertiary institutions.

The CVCNU further called for a review of the funding support to beneficiary institutions to access tier one journals and repositories to improve the research capabilities of staff and students and to also help build the capacity of academic staff for generating content, especially video and 3-Dimensional images, to support teaching.

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