The Tertiary Education Trust Fund has said that Nigerian lecturers across board are using the scholarship provided by the country to flee for greener pastures, a development commonly called “Japa” in Nigeria.
This was disclosed by the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, in Abuja, the nation’s capital, on Thursday.
Lecturers involved cut across universities, polytechnics and Colleges of Educations.
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The Executive Secretary said they abscond once sent abroad on scholarship by the agency.
Echono, who addressed heads of benefitting institutions at a one-day stakeholders’ engagement on emerging issues that affect TETFund intervention, challenged participants to take responsibility and assist the body ensure that credible scholars are recommended for foreign scholarships.
He said: “We are entrusted with the responsibility of rehabilitating the physical infrastructure and other content aspects of the nation’s entire public tertiary institutions.
“We have successfully sponsored over 37,000 scholars for both foreign and local PhDs, Masters, Bench Work and Post-Doctoral programmes in various institutions within and outside Nigeria.
“Sadly, we are having growing cases of scholars’s abscondment, scholars not returning to serve their bonds at their home institutions upon completion of their programmes.
“In fact, the challenge of scholars absconding has undermined and complicated TETFund’s scholarship for Academic Staff programme, thus bringing it under intense scrutiny.
“It is for these and other reasons that this engagement was organised.
“We need to address these challenges and find solutions to ensure the effective and smooth implementation of our scholarship programmes.
“We recently signed several Memorandum of Understanding with some prestigious institutions overseas that included universities in Malaysia, India, Brazil, France and the United States with a view to boosting and enhancing the TSAS programme in the future.”
