Abandoned Projects: TETFund bars defaulting institutions from 2027 funding

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund has announced that tertiary institutions with delayed or abandoned TETFund-funded projects will not be allowed to access new intervention projects under the 2027 allocation cycle unless they complete the outstanding projects.

The tough stance was adopted by the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the Fund as part of sweeping measures aimed at ending years of project delays, cost overruns, and poor implementation that have undermined the impact of TETFund interventions across Nigeria’s tertiary institutions.

Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Aminu Masari, made this known in a statement on Wednesday signed by its Head of Public Relations, Abdulmumin Oniyangi.

Masari said the board had taken a “final stand” on the issue after observing that many institutions continued to fail to complete approved projects within stipulated timelines.

He explained that although external factors such as fluctuations in the prices of construction materials initially contributed to project delays, the board had introduced a special intervention line in 2023 to enable institutions to complete affected projects.

Despite that intervention, he lamented that delays had continued in several institutions, blaming the trend largely on lack of continuity by successive heads of institutions who abandoned inherited projects in favour of new ones, as well as bureaucratic bottlenecks that slow payments to contractors.

He warned that internal politics and administrative red tape within beneficiary institutions would no longer be allowed to frustrate projects financed with public funds.

To permanently address the challenge, the Board approved a raft of immediate measures.

Under the new directives, every beneficiary institution must compile a comprehensive inventory of all projects that have remained uncompleted for more than six months beyond their scheduled completion dates, clearly stating the reasons for the delays and proposing practical solutions.

The institutions are also required to rank the projects according to priority and relevance, while providing detailed cost estimates needed for their completion.

In addition, each institution is to establish a robust project supervision mechanism involving its physical planning and maintenance departments to ensure projects are delivered on schedule, within approved costs and according to required quality standards.

Most significantly, institutions with delayed projects will now be compelled to channel their annual, zonal and high impact intervention allocations towards completing those projects before seeking approval for any new ones.

The Board declared that no fresh projects would be admitted for any institution identified as having outstanding delayed projects during the 2027 intervention cycle.

To ensure compliance, TETFund disclosed that monitoring teams made up of Board members and the Fund’s technical officials would embark on nationwide inspections of affected projects between August and September 2026.

The inspections, the Fund said, would assess the status of the projects and evaluate completion plans submitted by beneficiary institutions ahead of the Board’s statutory meeting in October 2026, where projects to be included in the 2027 disbursement guidelines would be considered.