50% of students sponsored abroad don’t want to return – TETFUND secretary

The Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund, Sonny Echono, has said that Fifty percent of lecturers sent abroad for advanced learning and capacity building fail to return to Nigeria.

In a recent interview with Punch. Echono said TETFFUND has been doing a lot of capacity building but that the returns have not been as rewarding as some schools don’t even need the capacity building they provide. He mentioned that an institution like the University of Ibadan, all their lecturers have a minimum of PhD and so having a programme to train them for Masters and PhD does not mean anything to them. He went on to state that TETFUND has minimized post-graduate scholarships abroad for lecturers.

‘’We are minimising because it has been a major source of problem for us. And the costs have become prohibitive. The cost of flight tickets is high. Due to exchange rates, tuition is high. So, you are spending N100m or N120m on one person, when if you do it at home, that amount can train more than 15 people. So we don’t have such resources to waste. Moreover, there is a very high risk, almost 50 per cent of them who go there now don’t want to come back. So, you have just wasted their money and wasted the time of the students who are waiting for him to bring the knowledge to come and impart on them, so we are refocusing our training locally.”

Speaking further, he said

‘’Today, as I’m speaking to you, depending on the cost, training in the UK and the US, the minimum you can do in the UK now is N85m to N90m. In the US, it’s about N100m to N110m minimum. I’m not discussing Harvard or Yale or Oxford or Cambridge. I’m talking about the medium level institutions. You can imagine, all of that will go to one person because of exchange rate. Even tickets to travel now is very expensive. Upkeep is very expensive because you have to translate it into this high exchange rate. One pound is over N3,000, and in the UK, I believe we pay £1,000 or £1,200 every month. Multiply that.”

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