House Committee on
Education Thursday in Abuja said that the Federal Government
only can not continue to fund the education in Nigeria, calling
on all stakeholders to device new means of funding the sector.
Chairman of the Committee,
Hon. Farouk Lawan who led other lawmakers on an over-sight
function visit to the Education Trust Fund (ETF) office advised
that interventions in the sector should be focused at specific
critical areas so as to develop centers of excellence in the
country.
The committee whose main
aim of visiting the ETF was to ascertain the level of
utilisation of the 2008 budgetary allocation to the fund
reiterated that the positive efforts of the ETF in the sector
should be emulated and encouraged so that more positive avenues
for revenue generation can be developed.
Still urging for
alternative source of funding from all stakeholders to
compliment the efforts of the Federal Government, Hon. Lawan
advised ETF that if its interventions are channeled to specific
but critical areas of the education sector, more pronounced
positive results will be achieved.
Lawan who was reviewing
the Fund’s intervention in all Federal and State Government
institutions of education including State Ministries of
Education warned the ETF against being ‘jack of all trade,
master of non’ while challenging the management of the Fund to
maintain a good level of transparency in the management of the
Fund accruing to them so as to lead the beneficiaries by
example.
"In order to encourage
compliance of the utilisation of fund by the benefiting
institutions, it will be proper the Fund management maintain a
good level of transparency for others to copy.
"I want ETF to concentrate
intervention in few but critical sectors rather than
distributing the lean resources to many institutions where it
will be very difficult for benefiting institutions to use it
achieve tremendous feat", he urged the fund.
He went on to disclose
that as part of the Committee’s over-sight function, they meet
with stakeholders in the education sector to fashion out way
forward for the sector and that has earlier taken them to both
the Ministry and the Nigerian University Commission (NUC) before
paying visit to the Fund where they want to understand the
challenges and obstacles facing ETF in the actualisation of its
intervention mandate.
