INTERVIEW: Cartels were in charge of TETFund projects, but I’ve introduced reforms, says executive secretary

In March 2022, Sonny Echono was appointed as the executive secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) bringing diverse wealth of experience as an accomplished technocrat of over three decades to the agency.

Echono, in this interview with TheCable’s TAIWO ADEBULU, spoke about the ongoing controversy at the agency bordering on the N7.6 billion projects said to have been awarded without due process. He said the nature of the training programmes does not require federal executive council (FEC) approval. He also addressed the public perception of corruption often associated with TETFund.

TheCable had reported how the agency awarded two contracts to Fides Et Ratio Academy and Pole Global Marketing (PGM) within two months at the cost of N3.8 billion respectively without the approval of the FEC, which is required for the contract size.

TheCable: We are going straight to the point. Please, give us an overview of the projects in question and the execution status at the moment?

Echono: In 2016, the Fund in liaison with our beneficiary institutions came up with a roadmap on ICT and the thinking then was also because there was a major transformation going on in the education sector across the globe. In Nigeria, there are particular identified challenges.

We are losing a lot of our lecturers in droves and they are going abroad. We are also having the most youthful population. So many young people wanting to get admission to institutions and the facilities you have in terms of classrooms, hostels and so on in our schools will not be enough to cater for all these students. So, it was felt that we should leverage on ICT to increase access and the way to go about it is to have a hybrid mode of education where even if you are not physically there, you can do online programmes. Even institutions can also do what we call a hybrid, both online and face-to-face.

This roadmap was designed from 2016 and has been implemented. We have three standing committees made up of experts in ICT that are advising on this and each year when we now prepare for our disbursement guideline, we come up with what the priorities for the coming year will be and this we now take to our stakeholders forum. The stakeholders forum is where all the heads of beneficiary institutions come together with us, with the unions and all the other actors to decide the projects to be adopted for the following year.

For the current programme, last year, the committee recommended that we deepen the ICT implementation in the institutions. We agreed that we are going to make allocations for it — N100 million for each university and N50 million for each polytechnic and college of education for ICT.

Of this amount, 50% will be targeted at the peculiar needs of the institutions. So, every school will determine what they need to use that for whether they are going to buy computers, whether they are going to extend fiber, or whether they are preparing for, maybe sustainable power, solar, or whatever it is to support their ICT infrastructure. So, half of that resource is used for that. Then, the other half is to be used for what we now call converged services and that include these programmes we were talking about.

A key element in this year’s programme incorporates this training component that we want to give. We now have Teras.

Teras has all sorts of systems, anti-plagiarism checker. We have Ipsco, with so many libraries across the world, the digital library. If you don’t even teach your students and their scholars how to access these resources, how to manipulate them, because that is now replacing the old books and all of that, then you are not going to get enough access. This was why we designed this major programme for training of both students and staff, to understand the use of those platforms, the use of communication skills, and being able to participate online, be able to do assignments, how to submit it online, how to engage in interactive sessions and tests. We had no intention of getting involved in the implementation as we are now, which is why we allocated the money to the schools.

The only reason why the figures are put together is because of the fact that, particularly for the licensing fee, it has to be done in dollars. You saw what we did there. We now had to pay in bulk once to the institution on their behalf and they all consented because they were happy with what we did. By crashing the cost, they all made savings.

We are just like standing in the middle. Please bring down, crash your costs to the schools based on this volume, we are guaranteeing for you. That is the main essence of the MoU. On our part, as I told you earlier, when they say we should handle this on their behalf, we explored a number of functions because our reaction was actually evolving.

We started by seeing the vendors for these companies and we got approval. I also have that. I will show it to you from BPP. They are based on what we call intellectual property rights. If I want to buy a Boeing plane, there is no point asking other aircraft manufacturers to quote for a Boeing plane because it is only Boeing that produce their own. So, that is how intellectual property is treated. It’s only the accredited vendors that would have come to sell it or buy it. But we advise that why deal with vendors that have very limited capacity to give any discount? The only capacity they have is maybe 10%. Whatever percentage commission they pay them, they may reduce from it because they want your market.

But if you are going to talk about almost getting 40% or 60% discount, you have to get to the owner of the copyright, the main company itself, and that was how it led us to the two intellectual property owners and we achieved that huge discount.

So, once that was done, again, and the systems were agreed upon. The value of the discount, it was about 60% that we got.

TheCable: Why did you settle for an MoU?

Echono: In contracts, the other party can say you should come out and negotiate because of foreign exchange issues. But MoU, by definition, two of you are agreeing to collaborate, to partner, to cooperate. It is even possible under an MoU for somebody to help you without financial return, which is better than the contract, which is purely an exchange of values.

Give me this item, I give you that and once any person defaults, they will now begin to say non-performer. There is a claim attached to it. So, unfortunately for us, when that announcement was made, the official exchange rate went up. Meaning that the naira cover to get the equal number of dollars now went up.

If we had done this at N448 that we intended, if we had done it in a small fraction, we would have got almost 80 something percent because they keep saying only at 20 percent cost. If you talk to Blackboard, they say they will give it to us practically in the dollar terms. But in reality for us, because we have to pay higher naira for the dollar, that was why what we saved about 60 percent, and that is huge compared to paying that to vendors. Imagine the amount of money that we’ve saved for the institution and they are very happy about it.

We use MoU generally for training programmes. It’s an academic programme. I told you the operating term is the school fees, the tuition fees. It is also a principle that payment for academic programmes or professional training is done at the point of registration. You do not say until you finish the programme, you write your exam and you pass, then you now pay your school fees. Under contract law, you will make the maximum advance payment. What you pay to a contractor is fixed at 30%. Every subsequent one will be made a milestone, what they call valuation. That could make it unsuitable for this type of arrangement.

It is not true that we have finished paying. We have 15% that we have not paid because the programmes are still running. I am now trying to ramp up more of our students to begin to use the platforms. If we made it a contract, they’d have told us to renew after one year. Otherwise, you can no longer have access to it. But this one, it is until we reach that number that we contracted for. That is what the benefit of an MoU again. We have been doing these MoUs and I inherited about nine of them when I came in. I have only done about four, I think.

TheCable: So far, what percentage of the total sum of the project has been paid to the contractors? You said they were not contracts; meanwhile one of the letters of approval mentioned contracts.

Echono: Only 85% have been paid for the two projects. There is no word contract in any of the 11 MoUs I have told you. Once we are discussing an MoU, it is not a contract. They are two different things. We are either doing a contract or we are doing an MoU.

But we do contracts and we do a lot of them. That’s my number one area of specialisation is. We even issue circulars, advising agencies to start advertising their contracts. We advertise all our projects. Four of these projects are going to FEC. For somebody who has been director of procurement in five major ministries, you will naturally know that I will not be afraid of procurement. I have a perfect score of 100% in FEC. My projects are so good that they always get approved. If not that we would have lost so much money if we go through these vendors, it is the quickest route. But we would have lost a lot of money and we won’t have got the type of mileage, credibility and recognition that we are getting now. Fundamentally, once we are dealing with a project, we will talk about contracts.

When you are dealing with an MoU, it is a memorandum of understanding. Some MoUs may lead to projects being executed. For example, we did one with Campus France. Campus France is relating with 29 institutions in France. They are not a university. But they are our partners on the MoU. But they place our people in those 29 institutions.

TheCable: Despite documentary evidence on the projects in question, are you insisting that there is no form of irregularity? Also, in your rejoinder to our story, there is no clear relationship between your international partners and the local firms who got N7.6 billion.

Echono: Between me, you and my God, there is nothing irregular. Take my word for it and you can check anywhere. Nothing.

First of all, there are two separate programmes. Yes, the Anthology blackboard is different from the Fides one. Each of them have a local Nigerian representative or vendor that represents them here. PGM is the one with blackboard and Fides is with Edunet. We knew the vendors first because they made proposals. We initially wanted to go through the vendors, then we asked that why don’t we get to the real owners instead of using their Nigerian representatives. The whole idea of adopting Blackboard and even the communication skills came from our standing committees on ICT as part of the long roadmap.

The original proposal may be three years old. You know, but we may not pick it yet. The conversation will be going on. You may say, okay, next year. The big understanding that they showed was during this exchange rate thing. It almost scattered our plans. The programmes are ongoing.

TheCable: Can you tell us the success rate so far?

Echono: For me, as an administrator, and the type of target I set for myself, I’m not happy. But they’ve done very well. You can see the number is about 2.7 million. But the number of users is significantly less than that. I’m watching from the user end, not those who have now been registered on it. It’s just like registered voters and those who actually vote on election day. My own measure is not in the number of people who are registered on it. It is in those who actually use it on a daily basis.

So, I have told institutions that they should find a way of refining their data. Get them to use it, which is why the training for lecturers and students was important, and that is what we are doing now.

TheCable: Can you quickly speak on the issue of paying a local company in dollars?

Echono: It is not true. It is false. The records are very clear. We paid to Blackboard directly through CBN. We did not pay a single dollar to any local company. We have no way of doing that. The central bank is there; they can check. We have no account in any commercial bank.

In the first place, these payments are passing through CBN. As I said earlier, we are not the one paying. We are only giving instructions. We do offshore, but it goes straight to the offshore company directly.

TheCable: Some stakeholders say TETFund is a cesspool of corruption. What do you feel about this and what are you doing to curb it?

Echono: People are invited to come and see the new TETFund. When I was asked to come here, I was given a mandate and I have introduced reforms, made very powerful enemies and you can see some bits of that. It shows that we have done a quick deal in reforming our systems to the acknowledgement of all our stakeholders.

The initial impression that TETFund is a cesspool of corruption was an exaggerated one. I can confirm that from my experience. It was an exaggeration of what was happening. There were some type of cartels that were in charge of TETFund projects and they also felt that all manners of political leaders could come to TETFund, collect what they call special intervention. There were no form of system or processes in place. I invited ICPC to come and inspect the systems and they did. They have come back the second time.

We have resolved issues of lecturers who get trained and they abscond. There are lecturers who collect money to go for workshops, conferences and they don’t go. We are recovering money. We are punishing and prosecuting them.

The ones that have absconded, we also have a programme through our embassies, through the embassies of the countries which they are. That is why our MoU again is coming in. When we sign an MoU with you, you must repatriate the student to us. It’s your responsibility. We didn’t have that before. That was why they could jump their bond. So, we have cleaned that out. We’ve done a lot of reforms. We run a very transparent system.

TheCable: TETFund is often associated with abandoned projects. It has practically become a thing. What are you doing about this?

Echono: We’ve got approval to create a special intervention line for completion of abandoned projects. Today, I met with two institutions. When they come, we invite them to discuss these projects. We have a whole department for monitoring projects.

But, by the grace of God, we are completing abandoned projects. There are some that are basically technical issues. Some are contractual. The contractor is not competent.

Everybody assumes that any project you see on campus is a TETFund project. That’s not correct. The highest number of projects on our campuses that are abandoned are those from the regular projects and it is because of the way funding is done in our budgeting system, which is not efficient. TETFund has one of the highest rates of completion compared to others. As I speak, I have 180 projects ready for commissioning.

TheCable: You are relatively young in TETFund. What’s the next big thing for you?

Echono: Many issues. But as I said, we are taking our bearing from Mr. President. What the president is focused on is the competitiveness of our tertiary institutions. He is also focused on skills. What Mr. President is saying is that train our students not just to obtain a degree. Let them have proficiencies. Let them be modern graduates that can work anywhere in the world. Regardless of the course, he wants to promote employability. Entrepreneurship is there so that we produce people who will be wealth creators, not people who are queuing to look for jobs.

There are new initiatives in ICT that we are bringing on. Learn to earn. That’s coming on board, right on our campuses. We are making it possible to provide resources, provide training opportunities for our students while you are doing your course. It will not affect your academic programme. But you will learn skills that you can take on board and begin to do outsourcing jobs while you are in school. Nigerian students are very hardworking. They are very brilliant. They can combine this easily.

Mr. President said we should upskill. As I am talking to you, three of our team members are moving across the country to polytechnics, universities, assessing their laboratories, workshops. We want to provide them equipment. We want to upskill those instructors. We want each polytechnic to adopt a number of skills that they want to be known for.

We want all these people who are causing problems for us on the street to come and learn something. Learn a trade. Begin to participate in the economy. Earn something so that you can feed your family.

We have innovation hubs and entrepreneurship centres we are replicating on our campuses. We are driving employability. We are promoting research. If I can achieve those things in my tenure, I will leave here a very happy man.