“Through our recovery efforts, we had traced monies to houses built by lecturers with the public fund; there are cases of cars purchased with the money, without any research work done.”
Tertiary Education Trust Fund , an interventionist agency mainly saddled with funding academic research in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions, the other day passed a blanket vote of no confidence in lecturers in public higher institutions over alleged misappropriation of grants. Although the development is regrettable, it suggests that Nigerian academia has excess research grants than the evidence will support.
TETFund is right: misappropriated public fund and diversion of grants aimed at solution-oriented investigation are criminal and condemnable. However, such social malaise should not be unexpected in institutions of higher learning as a sub-set of the Nigerian society.
Comparatively, the average of N732 million or $2.03 million equivalent per institution is a far cry from $32 million the University of Ghana alone received from research donor agencies for 2015-16 academic year. Even Ghana does not compare with top 10 universities in South Africa in terms of research grants. How much more Harvard University with $1.6 billion, University of Washington $727.9 million or the University of California, $673.5 million for 2020 research grants alone.
As a sensitive organisation, TETFund should have been more clear-headed, graphic and convincing with full disclosure of the misappropriated sum and those behind it, if any. Without that, the agency has embarked on a witch-hunt or blatant cover-up of inefficiency. Either way, it amounts to a criminal demarketing of an already battered Nigerian education system and longsuffering lecturers.
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