Where Is the Money? The Full Story of NANS's 90-Day Nationwide Probe Into Abandoned TETFund Projects

The Announcement That Set the Education Sector Talking

On Sunday, June 8, 2026, the National Association of Nigerian Students — NANS, the umbrella body representing every student enrolled in Nigeria's public tertiary institutions — issued a formal statement announcing the launch of a 90-day nationwide probe into projects funded by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund. The statement, signed by NANS President Dist. Comrade Akinteye Babatunde Afeez, announced the inauguration of an Independent TETFund Intervention Project Assessment, Verification and Monitoring Committee, charged with conducting a comprehensive review of TETFund-funded projects across universities, polytechnics and colleges of education from one end of Nigeria to the other.

The language of the statement was measured but unmistakably pointed. While acknowledging that the Federal Government had continued to invest heavily in the education sector through TETFund interventions, NANS said it was no longer sufficient to count disbursements and consider the job done. The association stated that "allegations of project abandonment, poor execution, substandard delivery, delayed completion and other fraudulent practices reportedly perpetrated by some contractors entrusted with the implementation of TETFund projects across beneficiary institutions" had generated public concern and raised fundamental questions about whether the fund's interventions were actually reaching the students they were designed to serve. The committee, NANS said, had been mandated to independently verify the status of those projects and assess their tangible impact on teaching, learning and student welfare.

Who NANS Is and Why Its Actions Carry Weight

To understand why this announcement matters beyond student union politics, it is necessary to understand what NANS actually represents in the Nigerian institutional landscape. The National Association of Nigerian Students is not merely a campus club or a debating society. It is a constitutionally recognised civil society body with chapters across every geopolitical zone in Nigeria, with student executives at the institutional, zonal and national levels, and with a history of engagement on national education policy that dates back to the independence era. Its national president holds a position of genuine political weight — one that successive education ministers, university vice-chancellors and government officials have found it necessary to engage seriously.

NANS's decision to constitute an independent monitoring committee and dispatch it on a 90-day nationwide tour is not a gesture. It is a calculated exercise of institutional power — using the association's extensive campus network to gather the kind of ground-level intelligence that government audit institutions, hindered by bureaucratic process and political relationships, cannot always access as quickly or as candidly. Student representatives at each institution know which building projects have been under construction since 2019 with no visible progress. They know which laboratories were supposedly equipped with TETFund funds but remain empty or non-functional. They know which contractors were paid and disappeared. The independent committee's nationwide tour is designed to put that knowledge into a formal, documented structure that can be presented to TETFund, the Federal Ministry of Education, and if necessary, to the National Assembly and the public.

What TETFund Is: The Architecture of Nigerian Education Funding

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund occupies a specific and important position in Nigeria's education financing framework. Established by the TETFund Act of 2011 — which reconstituted and strengthened the earlier Education Tax Fund created in 1993 — TETFund is funded by a 2.5 percent Education Tax levied on the assessable profits of all Nigerian companies registered under the Companies and Allied Matters Act. Every medium and large company operating in Nigeria pays this levy. TETFund collects it, pools it, and distributes it annually as intervention funds to the country's 271 public tertiary institutions — every federal and state university, polytechnic, and college of education on the government's register.

The scale of money flowing through TETFund has grown dramatically and rapidly under the Tinubu administration. In 2023, TETFund disbursed N320.3 billion across its intervention programmes. In 2024, that figure rose to N683.4 billion — more than double the 2023 figure. In 2025, TETFund announced a total intervention envelope of approximately N1.6 trillion — a fivefold surge within two years that the This Day Live editorial board described as "not merely an increase but a seismic shift in ambition." For the 2026 intervention cycle, TETFund announced allocations totalling N6.452 billion to the 271 beneficiary institutions under the annual direct intervention component alone, with each university receiving N2.525 billion, each polytechnic receiving N1.871 billion, and each college of education receiving N2.056 billion. In total, more than 91 percent of TETFund's revenue is channelled directly to beneficiary institutions in the form of these annual direct disbursements, with the balance covering the agency's operational costs and special intervention programmes.

TETFund's interventions are not confined to cash transfers. They are project-based: the agency identifies specific infrastructure needs at each institution — a new lecture theatre, a laboratory block, a library annex, a hostel block, an ICT centre, sports facilities, security infrastructure — approves project specifications and budgets, selects contractors through a procurement process, and monitors delivery. Since its inception, TETFund has supported over 5,525 infrastructure projects across Nigeria's tertiary institutions. For the period June to September 2026, TETFund has disclosed plans to commission more than 411 intervention projects across 271 institutions — a commissioning schedule of extraordinary ambition and extraordinary complexity.

The Problem: Where Billions Go and Nothing Gets Built

The gap between what TETFund disburses and what Nigerian students actually experience in their institutions is the foundational problem that NANS's probe seeks to document. It is not a new problem — it is a systemic one, embedded in the intersection of procurement corruption, contractor failure, institutional mismanagement and inadequate monitoring that characterises a significant portion of Nigerian public infrastructure spending regardless of the sector.

The patterns are well established and widely acknowledged even by TETFund's own leadership. Contractors are awarded projects and paid mobilisation fees, then disappear or deliver work of such substandard quality that buildings crack or collapse before completion. Projects are commissioned on paper — officially recorded as complete in TETFund's systems — while physically they exist as roofless shells, partially dug foundations, or buildings lacking windows, electricity connections and functional plumbing. Institutions with unutilised TETFund allocations from previous intervention cycles have failed to access or deploy those funds, sometimes for years, leaving money unspent while the physical infrastructure those funds were meant to create does not materialise. Equipment funded through ICT and laboratory intervention lines is delivered — to storage rooms, where it sits unpacked and unused because the buildings it was intended to equip are not ready, or because the institutions lack the technical staff to operate it.

TETFund's own Executive Secretary, Arc. Sonny Echono, acknowledged several of these problems directly in his address to beneficiary institutions at the launch of the 2026 intervention cycle in January. He pointed specifically to delays in project approvals and procurement processes within institutions, the slow and reluctant utilisation of the TERAS digital platform — a technology investment that risks going to waste if not adopted — and warned explicitly that institutions with unspent funds from previous cycles would not receive additional allocations until existing resources were fully deployed. He urged heads of institutions to work closely with their governing councils to accelerate project execution. The TETFund Board of Trustees Chairman, Rt. Hon. Aminu Bello Masari, expressed concern about delays by some institutions in accessing previously allocated funds, noting that "Nigerians are interested in knowing how the Fund's allocations are deployed."

Those statements from within TETFund itself confirm that the problem NANS is investigating is real, acknowledged and persistent. What is missing — what NANS's independent committee seeks to provide — is a comprehensive, institution-by-institution, project-by-project inventory of the specific locations, specific projects and specific failures that aggregate into the systemic picture.

The Committee: Its Mandate, Its Method and Its Timeline

The Independent TETFund Intervention Project Assessment, Verification and Monitoring Committee constituted by NANS has been given a 90-day mandate — placing its initial report deadline in early September 2026. The committee's methodology, as announced in the NANS statement, involves a physical nationwide tour covering universities, polytechnics and colleges of education across all six geopolitical zones of Nigeria.

The committee's specific mandate covers four dimensions. First, it will evaluate the level of implementation of TETFund-funded projects at each institution it visits — determining which projects are completed, which are ongoing, which are abandoned, and which have never been started despite funds having been released. Second, it will assess the quality of delivery — determining whether completed projects meet the specifications for which they were funded, or whether they represent substandard execution that fails to serve the educational purposes for which they were built. Third, it will assess utilisation — whether completed infrastructure is actually being used for its intended purpose, or whether it sits empty, under-utilised or inaccessible to students. Fourth, it will assess overall impact — gathering direct testimony from students and academic staff about whether TETFund projects have meaningfully improved their experience of teaching and learning at their institutions.

The committee will not have subpoena powers, auditing authority or the ability to compel contractors or institutions to produce financial records. It is a civil society monitoring body operating through access, observation and interview rather than through the coercive powers available to government audit institutions like the Office of the Auditor-General or the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. Its power is the power of documented, published evidence — the kind that creates political and reputational accountability even where formal legal accountability is slow to follow.

The Broader Context: Nigeria's Education Infrastructure Crisis

NANS's probe is not taking place in a vacuum. It sits within a broader and deeply troubling picture of Nigeria's tertiary education infrastructure — a picture that years of chronic underfunding, rapid enrolment growth and inadequate maintenance have made genuinely alarming even in institutions that have benefited from TETFund intervention.

Nigeria's public universities collectively enroll approximately two million students annually, across institutions whose physical infrastructure was designed for far smaller student populations. Lecture theatres at major federal universities regularly have students sitting on floors, standing in doorways, or watching lectures on screens in overflow venues because the rooms are too small for the classes they serve. Libraries lack current textbooks and journals. Laboratories lack functioning equipment. Hostels have been demolished without replacement, pushing students into expensive and unsafe private accommodation. Internet connectivity on most campuses is unreliable or non-existent. Power supply, even with TETFund's N70 billion investment in campus solar and gas generation facilities across the 2025 cycle, remains erratic.

Into this reality, TETFund has poured hundreds of billions of naira over more than three decades. The question that NANS is asking — loudly, publicly and with the institutional weight of millions of Nigerian students behind it — is whether those hundreds of billions are producing the physical transformation that the numbers in TETFund's annual reports suggest they should be. The answer, based on what students see when they walk across their campuses every day, is frequently and painfully no.

What TETFund Has Said and Is Doing in 2026

TETFund's leadership has not been silent on the accountability question. In the January 2026 intervention launch, Executive Secretary Echono committed to what he described as a "transparency framework" — a pledge that annual allocations would be published, that project commissioning would be tied to physical verification, and that the TERAS digital platform would be used to create a live monitoring dashboard of project status across all institutions. He introduced the Nigerian Research and Education Network as a new intervention line specifically designed to improve the quality and global connectivity of research at beneficiary institutions. He warned that TETFund would be "paying closer attention" in 2026 to institutions slow to utilise the platform and slow to deploy their allocations.

Whether these internal accountability mechanisms are adequate for the scale of the problem is precisely the question NANS's external, independent probe is designed to test. The value of a civil society investigation that operates independently of TETFund, independently of the Federal Ministry of Education, and independently of the vice-chancellors and rectors whose institutional reputations are at stake in any negative finding, is that it is structurally free from the conflicts of interest that constrain internal accountability mechanisms. NANS has no interest in covering up the abandoned lecture theatre at a particular university. The vice-chancellor of that university has every institutional interest in describing it as a project in progress.

Why This Investigation Matters — and What Must Happen Next

The NANS probe of TETFund projects matters for three reasons that extend well beyond the immediate findings any 90-day exercise can produce.

The first is the principle of students as stakeholders rather than merely beneficiaries. For too long, the conversation about TETFund accountability has been a conversation among institutional administrators, government officials, contractors and auditors — with students as the passive objects of the expenditure rather than active participants in its oversight. NANS's decision to constitute an independent monitoring committee is a statement that the people most directly affected by whether a lecture theatre gets built or a laboratory gets equipped have both the right and the responsibility to verify that the spending intended to serve them is actually doing so.

The second is the timeliness of independent oversight. Government audit cycles are slow. The Office of the Auditor-General may report on a particular project years after its failure has become obvious to every student on the affected campus. A civil society investigation that can be in the field within weeks of its announcement and can produce preliminary findings within 90 days operates at a speed that governmental accountability cannot match, and can create the political urgency that slower formal processes frequently fail to generate.

The third is the national significance of what TETFund represents. In January 2024, TETFund approved N643 billion. In 2025, N1.6 trillion. In 2026, N6.45 billion in direct annual interventions alone, with further special intervention commitments on top. These are not small amounts. They are the product of a levy on every significant company operating in Nigeria, collected from the revenues of the Nigerian economy for the specific purpose of building, equipping and improving the tertiary institutions that are meant to prepare the next generation of Nigerian doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers and entrepreneurs. Every naira absorbed by an abandoned project or a substandard contractor is a naira stolen not just from government accounts but from a specific student who deserved a better laboratory, a better library, a better lecture theatre.

The NANS committee's tour begins in the days ahead. By early September, if the association delivers on its stated mandate, Nigeria will have an independent, evidence-based assessment of TETFund project delivery that no amount of official communication has yet produced. What happens with that assessment — whether it reaches the National Assembly, whether it reaches TETFund's board, whether it triggers genuine procurement reform and contractor accountability — will determine whether this investigation is the beginning of something consequential or a 90-day exercise that produces a report and nothing more.

Sources

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