Tax reform: Scrapping TETFUND ‘ll collapse tertiary education – ASUU

The President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Prof Emmanuel Osodeke on Tuesday warned that scrapping the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) as proposed in the tax reform bills will lead to the collapse of the tertiary education system in the country.

Osodeke, who said this while presenting the position of ASUU at the public hearing on tax reform bills organised by the Senate Committee on Finance, said the union is against the proposed abrogation of Education Tax, which he said “Poses serious threats to the survival of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).”

He urged the National Assembly to do all within its capacity to protect TETFund from being abrogated as proposed under the Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024.

SPONSOR AD

“From any objective assessment, TETFund has been the backbone for infrastructural development, postgraduate training and research capacity building in Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions in the last one-and-half decades.

• Paternity case: Court stops police from tendering DNA results against former minister
• Card reader almost set Nigeria ablaze in 2015 – Jonathan

“Over 90 per cent of capital projects in state and federal colleges of education, polytechnics and universities during this period were TETFund-sponsored. The intervention agency has also remained the primary source of higher degree training for young academics and support staff since 2011 when the Act establishing the Education Tax Fund (ETF) was re-oriented to its original intendment of an intervention agency for the development of tertiary institutions in Nigeria.

“ASUU is seriously worried that the Education Tax, called Development Levy, used to bankroll TETFund’s programmes is about to be ceded to the newly established Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND),” he said.

Osodeke said Section 59(3) of the Nigeria Tax Bill (NTB) 2024 states that only 50% of the Development Levy would be made available to TETFund in 2025 and 2026 while NITDA, NASENI, and NELFUND would share the remaining percentages.

He said the bill further proposed that “TETFund will also receive 66.7% in 2027, 2028 and 2029 years of assessment but “0% in 2030 year of assessment and thereafter”. From 2030, all funds generated from the Development Levy would be passed to NELFUND.

He said ASUU finds the development not only worrisome but also inimical to national development objective.

He said taking any percentage out of the Education Tax (Development Levy) to service another agency not known to the TETFund Act 2011 is illegal and should not be allowed to stand.

Osodeke also said that giving zero allocation of Development Levy to TETFund as from 2030 is a technical way of abrogating the agency, adding that the “Purported admonishment that TETFund should seek innovative ways of generating its funds is spurious and ill-advised because, as a creation of an Act, the institution dies without the fund.

“Replacing TETFund with NELFUND is comparable to killing a parent to keep a newborn child alive; it is unethical and against the principle of natural justice.”

He argued that the impact of TETFund on the campus of every tertiary institution in Nigeria is beyond description and that abrogating it will take public tertiary education many years back and undermine the modest gains in repositioning Nigerian universities for global reckoning and transformative development.

Osodeke said the annual supports given to tertiary institutions by TETFund have substantially reduced industrial crises in many tertiary institutions.

He said the renovation of old facilities and provision of new ones and opportunities for staff development leading to career advancement have doused labour-related agitations on the nation’s campuses.

“TETFund impacts not only tertiary-level education, but also the secondary down to kindergarten; it directly and/or indirectly supports the production of quality teachers and different categories of support staff in the entire educational system”, he said.

In his presentation, the Comptroller General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Adewale Adeniyi, raised concerns over what he described as conflicts in some of the clauses of the bill with the Sections of the Nigerian Customs Act 2023.

Adeniyi observed that clauses 78, 79, 141(1) and 143 of the proposed Nigeria Tax Bill 2024 are in conflict with the provisions of the NCS Act 2023, urging the committee to look into addressing such conflicts.

He said the NCS Act, which came into force in 2023 aims at modernising customs administration in the country, adding that the conflicting provisions in the proposed tax bills would amount to a move aimed at repealing the NCS Act 2023, which is barely two years’ old.

“And we have started to get results of this modernisation. In terms of revenue, our revenue has increased by 97% and has been on the upward trajectory.  And we have seen results in just about two years, less than two years, after the enactment of the Act.

“We, therefore, feel that two years into the implementation of an Act is a little bit too small for us to contend and repeat as this Act is saying”, he said.

The CG recommended that the Nigerian Customs Service be given institutional autonomy and there should be a legal clarity as it relates to provisions of the proposed bills vis-a-vis the function of NCS to avoid conflicts.

He said customs should be allowed to retain its mandate under the provisions of the NCS Act 2023 and that the final versions of the proposed bills do not contravene the NCS Act 2023, thereby contravening the functions and operational efficiency of the NCS.

Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, Sani Musa (APC Niger), while responding to the submissions, said the committee has taken note of them and would critically review them before coming up with a clean report for consideration and passage.