- FG Releases N2bn to FUNAAB
The Federal Government, through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, has set aside the sum of N2bn for agricultural development projects at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Ogun State.
The TETFund Executive Secretary, Dr Bichi Baffa, who confirmed this, said the university would be boosted by the government’s economic diversion to agricultural development.
Baffa, who also opened multiple projects at the university, lamented that unlike other institutions, FUNAAB had been lagging behind because of its inability to access more than N2bn allocated to it since 2013.
He blamed the inability of the university to get funding on the prolonged bickering and internal crises which, he said, the management was currently doing everything to avoid.
He said, “At the moment, over N2bn worth of allocation to the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta is with the Fund, waiting for the university to come and access. So we have been discussing with the Vice-Chancellor of the university and he has promised, after an extensive discussion, on how to overcome the problem of non-withdrawal and we even agreed on the time line.
“So with this commissioning, the vice-chancellor has started showing commitment and we will start also to disburse. The university will start to build new projects, commission new and bigger projects.”
The Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Kolawole Salako, said the institution would look into the area of the students’ dignity, which included the provision of good and functional lavatories.
Salako said, “We will not want to see students going to their hostels during lectures to use their toilets and lecturers having to go out of the lecture venues to go to toilets.
“For this, TETFund has given us N120m to provide these facilities. I want to assure the Fund that no money given to us will be misused, because the Governing Council will not allow it. We want to leave a legacy behind and we want to make sure that the past problems that kept us from performing is a thing of the past.”
According to a statement issued by the TETFund Director of Corporate Affairs and Public Relations, Ebikwo Benn, some of the projects commissioned in FUNAAB were a 1,000-seater capacity lecture theatre, a Biology laboratory, 250-seater Chemistry laboratory and 250-seater Physics laboratory.
