The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has decried the growing cases of abscondment among academic staff of various Nigerian universities sponsored for training abroad.
TETFund, has been intervening in the training of academic staff in Nigerian universities by sponsoring lecturers for further studies abroad.
Speaking during an interactive session on training utilisation at the Gombe State University (GSU), TETFund’s Director, Academic Staff Training and Development (AST&D), Muhammed Sulaiman, said some of the lecturers sponsored to foreign countries by TETFund for further, never returned to the country to serve their bond as they abscond.
According to him, the foreign training programme was being abused and is slowly becoming a major problem affecting the education system.
Sulaiman said, “The department of AST&D is guided by the guidelines for accessing the intervention and I believe these guidelines are well spelt and distributed to the beneficiary institutions”.
He said, the issue of sponsoring scholars particularly, outside the country and change of institution of study without recourse to TETFund is becoming a challenge.
According to him, “Some lecturers will be given the approval to study outside the country and would proceed to their studies but at the end of the day will not come back to the country to serve their bond or to continue their jobs as lecturers, these are some of the problems”.
He further revealed that the department is engaging the benefiting institutions with the view of find solutions to the problem.
Sulaiman said TETFund had invested a lot in the area of training and retraining of lecturers, adding that this investment has changed the narratives in the universities.
“Before the intervention by AST&D, records showed that only about 40 per cent of the Nigerian lecturers have PhD and Masters degrees and after the intervention, the figure raised to about 90 per cent”, Sulaiman said.
