The Nigerian Government on Monday officially enlisted the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, on monitoring all intervention projects it awarded to contractors in tertiary institutions, Vanguard reports.
The government explained that the move would ensure good quality jobs were done.
It also aspires to attain timely execution of the intervention contracts across the institutions.
This was disclosed at the presentation of a 36-seater Coaster bus that the government donated to the national leadership of the students union, led by NANS’ President, Usman Umar Barambu, in Abuja.
At the event, the Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono reiterated that students would henceforth be the agency’s eyes in their respective institutions.
He also said the government had equally engaged staff unions to monitor its projects on campuses.
Echono added that the engagement of the students was “the continuation of our (TETFund’s) constant dialogue with stakeholders.”
“We want them to be our eyes in their respective institutions,” Echono said.
“Just as President Ahmed Tinubu has been preaching to the rest of us, the students are at the centre of any policy on education because education is about students,” he explained.
TETFUND is the Nigerian Government scheme established in 2011 to disburse, manage, and monitor education tax to government-owned tertiary institutions in the country.
The agency’s intervention roles include the execution of projects and the supervision of the implementation of its various contracts across the institutions.
“So, we want a situation where if anything is going wrong in any project on campus, we should have multiple ways to be able to get information and one of those is through the students themselves who should be the beneficiaries of those interventions,” Echono revealed.
“TETFund is consulting with them (students) to find out their needs, their expectations, their aspirations to guide our recommendations to Mr. President to make the right interventions,
“So by our programme, we want to be able to identify on each campus, a contact person that would be able to liaise with our monitoring team and be able to engage. Sometimes, it will require us to just go visit a particular site to find out whether work is going on there or not, the quality of work and whether the contractor is there or not so we can have firsthand information and not when we wait for a school to apply for a particular tranche, then we send our team there and then discover that activities have already gone round.”
“We feel that going forward, this will help even our monitoring process to be more transparent and more engaging. When people know that the students who are always constantly there are watching out and can have an avenue of letting TETFund know what’s going on, I’m sure those who are working on these projects will sit up and ensure that they do good quality work.
Daily Trust