The Media RightsAgenda (MRA) has inducted the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) into its
Freedom of Information (FOI) Hall of Shame, reports ITRealms.
MRA also said the induction is for the institutional
failure on the part of TETFund to comply with its duties and obligations under
the FOI Act, 2011 and its repeated refusal to honour numerous applications for
information made to it under the Act by several organizations over the last six
years.
ITRealms gathered that TETFund selection into the FOI
Hall of Shame, according to MRA’s Programme Officer, Mr. Idowu Adewale, was
based on TETFund consistency on exhibition of an inexplicable disregard for the
rights of citizens to seek and obtain information from public institutions
while also demonstrating a near absolute contempt for the Law.
Adewale said, multiple requests made by various
non-governmental organizations to TETFund were either completely ignored
without even an acknowledgment, contrary to the provisions of the FOI Act, or
where it responded at all, it refused to provide any of the requested
information or, as it did on one occasion, provided only part of the
information sought.
Describing its attitude as a complete breach of the
institution’s obligations under the FOI Act, Mr. Adewale said: “In its short
years of existence, TETFund has consistently exhibited an inexcusable intolerance
for the rights of citizens and civic groups to hold public institutions
accountable in accordance with the FOI Act while at the same time betraying an
unmistakable disdain for the duties imposed on it by Law.”
TETFund was established by the Tertiary Education
Trust Fund (Establishment, etc) Act of 2011 as an intervention agency charged
with managing, disbursing and monitoring the education tax to public tertiary
institutions in Nigeria. To enable TETFund achieve these objectives, the
TETFund Act, 2011 imposed a two percent Education Tax on the assessable profit
of all registered companies in Nigeria.
The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) is empowered
by the TETFund Act to assess and collect the Education Tax while TETFund
administers the tax and disburses various amounts to tertiary educational
institutions at Federal and State levels. It also monitors the projects
executed with the funds allocated to the beneficiary institutions.
The mandate of the Fund, as provided in Section
7(1)(a) to (e) of the TETFund Act, is to administer and disburse the amount in
the Fund to Federal and State tertiary educational institutions and ensure that
funds generated from education tax are utilized to improve the quality of
education in Nigeria without direct contract awarding.
Adewale noted that “TETFund is uniquely positioned
to have begun operations on the right footing, having been established the same
year the FOI Act was passed. The institution, unlike many other public
institutions, had the opportunity to kick off its operations by implementing
the FOI Act which would have gone a long way to ensure transparency and
accessibility to citizens as well as the proper keeping and management of its
records. Instead, TETFund which ought to have submitted six annual reports to
the Attorney-General of the Federation on its implementation of the Act since
it was passed into law in 2011, has not submitted a single report.”
He said as a result of the failure of the body to
submit its annual implementation reports over the last six years, vital
statistical information which the reports are supposed to provide to the
public, the Attorney-General of the Federation and the relevant committees of
the National Assembly are not available, including information which would have
shown how many requests for information the institution has received annually
since 2011, how many of these it has processed and granted and how many of the
requests it denied each year, among others.
Mr. Adewale said, however, that information obtained from
various organizations that have submitted FOI requests to TETFund reveal its
poor level of responsiveness to such requests.
For instance, BudgIT, a civic organization based in
Lagos, wrote to TETFund in January 2017 pursuant to the FOI Act, seeking information
on TETFund’s total cash inflow for 2014 and 2015 as well as a list of its
2014/2015 reconciled projects and the location of each of those projects, but
received no response.
BudgIT sent TETFund a reminder to the request in
February 2017 but the institution again not respond. BudgIT sent another
reminder to TETFund on September 25, 2017 and yet another on November 15, 2017
but still did not receive any response from the institution.
The findings of the Public and Private Development
Centre (PPDC) in its 2017 FOI ranking of 166 public institutions based on an
assessment of the levels of public access to procurement related records and
information, such as information on procurement plans, procurement processes
and capital expenditure, which was released on September 28, 2017, put TETFund
amongst the worst performing set of institutions. TETFund did not respond to
PPDC’s January 27, 2017 request for information and has not proactively
published any of the procurement records and information that it is required by
Law to publish proactively, despite having an active website.
Mr. Adewale pointed out that TETFund has not fulfilled
its proactive disclosure obligations under Section 2 of the FOI Act as it has
not published either on its website or anywhere else, the 16 categories of
information that the FOI Act requires all public institutions to proactively
publish and disseminate widely to members of the public through various means,
including print, electronic and online sources.
According to information available from the Economic
and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), TETFund’s Accountant as well as two
other individuals and two companies were charged before a Gombe State High
Court in May, 2017, accused of various fraudulent and corrupt practices.
The trio of Auwal Ibrahim, principal accountant of
TETFund in Abuja; Wali Muktar Usman, the Director of Works at the Federal
College of Education in Gombe, as well as Architect Yunusa Yakubu and his
companies, Lubell Nigeria Limited and Archfirst Nigeria limited, were arraigned
before Justice Sa'ad Muhammad on a 17 count charge of conspiracy, contract
scam, abuse of office and diversion of public funds. The accused persons were
alleged to have abused their positions by awarding inflated TETFund contracts
to companies in which they had interest or which belong to their cronies.
They were also accused of receiving gratification from contractors.
Mr. Adewale said it was not surprising that the
institution’s staff was facing such charges, given the obvious lack of
transparency in its operations, adding: “as an institution which collects,
manages, monitors and disburses public funds, TETFund should understand the
importance of accountability, transparency and fiscal responsibility. TETFund
should therefore make the required effort to provide the public with
information on its activities and operations, especially as it is obliged by
law to do so, and in the face of the possibility of the involvement of its
staff in such nefarious activities.”
According to Mr. Adewale, "TETFund ought to
disclose information on the monies it receives from FIRS and other sources, its
disbursements as well as its operations in line with its proactive disclosure
obligations. It is unacceptable that the institution is refusing to disclose information,
including part of other organization’s profits that it collects, manages and
disburses, even when such information has been specifically requested, when the
information ought to have been proactively published in the first instance
without the need for anyone to make a formal request for it."
MRA endorsed BudgIT’s observation that TETFund “keeps
allocating public funds to public tertiary institutions without publishing how
the money was spent to the public” and echoed BudgIT question: “How transparent
is TETFund when they don't publish reports of how money was spent since 2013?”
Another organization, the Human Rights Agenda Network
(HRAN), which has also made an FOI request to TETFund, recently reported that
the institution finally responded to it by a letter dated November 9, 2017 but
which was served on the Network on Tuesday, November 15, 2017, after it had
sent a reminder to TETFund in an effort to ensure that the institution was
given ample opportunity to forestall legal action against it.
In response to HRAN’s request for information, TETFund
disclosed its financial statements in respect of the Administration Fund
Account and Project Fund Account for the years 2011 to 2014, but claimed that
although its audited annual statements for 2015 and 2016 were ready, there was
no existing Board of Trustees to sign and approve them.
This puts the institution’s responsiveness at best as
partial. Although some of the information sought were provided, the response
was far from satisfactory as TETFund failed to provide HRAN with a
comprehensive list of beneficiaries of the Fund from 2011 till date, as
requested by the network.
Mr. Adewale said: “This situation portrays a high
level of sloppiness in the record keeping and management of TETFund and indeed
a violation of Section 2(1) and (2) of the Act, which requires TETFund, as a
public institution, to ensure that it records and keeps
information about all its activities, operations and businesses and to
similarly ensure the proper organization and maintenance of all information in
its custody in a manner that facilitates public access to such information.”
MRA also accused TETFund of disregarding other aspects
of the FOI Act including Section 2(3)(f), which mandates every public
institution to publish the title and address of an appropriate officer to whom
applications for information should be sent; and Section 13 of the Act which
requires the institution to ensure the provision of appropriate training for
its officials on the public’s right of access to information and for the
effective implementation of the Act.
MRA stressed that TETFund’s persistent denial of
requests for information was inconsistent with its role as a body which deals
with public funds at such a high level. It therefore called on the institution
to take necessary steps to change its negative culture and to comply with the
provisions of the Act.
MRA launched the “FOI Hall of Shame”
on July 3 to draw attention to public officials and institutions that
are undermining the effectiveness of the Freedom of Information Act, 2011
through their actions, inactions, utterances and decisions.
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