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Through the Tax Bill 2024, the union urged the National Assembly—particularly Senate President Godswill Akpabio and House of Representatives Speaker Tajudeen Abbas—to exercise their constitutional authority in order to save the TETFund from impending demise.
In a statement provided to the Nigerian Tribune on Tuesday and signed by their national president, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, the university lecturers expressed this worry.
ASUU claims that permitting the proposed new tax regime to adversely impact the Education Tax, also known as the development levy, in order to fund the TETFund’s initiatives under the pretext of giving up funds from the recently created Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) is concerning, risky, and unpatriotic.
Section 59(3) of the Nigeria Tax Bill (NTB) 2024 explicitly stipulates that only 50% of the Development Levy will be made available to TETFund in 2025 and 2026, with the remaining percentages being shared by NITDA, NASENI, and NELFUND, according to ASUU.
Additionally, “66.7% in 2027, 2028, and 2029 years of assessment” will go to the TETFund, but “0% in 2030 year of assessment and thereafter.”
“The far-reaching consequence of the new tax system is that from 2030, all funds generated from the Development Levy will be passed to NELFUND.
Since the TETFund has been the backbone of postgraduate training, research capacity building, and infrastructure development in Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions for the past 25 years, the union further noted that taking any percentage of the Education Tax (Development Levy) to support an agency not recognized by the Act establishing the TETFund in 2011 is illegal and should not be allowed to continue. “As a union, we find this development not only worrisome but also inimical to our national development objective because of the potential danger to the TETFund’s survival.”
“Giving zero allocation of Development Levy to TETFund as from 2030 is a technical way of killing the agency as the purported admonishment that TETFund should seek innovative ways of generating its funds is spurious and ill-advised.
“So, replacing TETFund with NELFUND is tantamount to killing a parent to keep a newborn child alive which is unethical and against the principle of natural justice.”
ASUU stated that the impact of TETFund on campuses is beyond description and scrapping it will therefore take Nigeria’s public tertiary education many years back and also undermine the modest gains in repositioning Nigerian universities for global reckoning and transformative development.
“So, Nigeria should be improving on the operations and sustainability of TETFUND and not killing the agency,” ASUU concluded.
