FG – Kwararafa Reporters

Nigeria Imports 25m Litres Of Petrol Daily, FG Confirms

The Federal Government on Wednesday disclosed that Nigeria’s petrol consumption has dropped to 50 million litres per day with local refineries supplying half of the daily...

News3 weeks ago

FG Urges Traders To Reduce Food Prices

The Federal Government has urged retailers to reflect the reduction in food prices and shun exploiting consumers. Abubakar Kyari, the Minister of Agriculture and Natural Resources,...

Kanu Raises Alarm, Alleges Tricks By FG To Perpetually Hold Him Down

Top News3 weeks ago

Kanu Raises Alarm, Alleges Tricks By FG To Perpetually Hold Him Down

Leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, has drawn attention to what he described as serial executive and judicial fraud being perpetrated...

Probe Weighty Claim USAID Funded Boko Haram Ndume Tells FG

News3 weeks ago

Probe Weighty Claim USAID Funded Boko Haram Ndume Tells FG

Former Senate Chief Whip, Senator Ali Ndume, has called on the Federal Government and the National Assembly to investigate allegations by U.S. Congressman Scott Perry that...

Further Hike In Electricity Tariff Will Be Resisted — NLC

News3 weeks ago

Telecoms Tariff: FG Deploys Security Agents As NLC Insists On Protest

The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps on Sunday warned the Nigeria Labour Congress against its planned March 1 shutdown of telecommunication services in response to...

FG Demands To Convert $50bn Announcements Into Actual Investments

News4 weeks ago

FG Demands To Convert $50bn Announcements Into Actual Investments

The Federal government has moved to convert over $50 billion in investment announcements for Nigeria since the inception of the current administration into actual investments. Speaking...

Civil Servants Get Feb 17 Deadline For IPPIS Verification

Top News1 month ago

Civil Servants Get Feb 17 Deadline For IPPIS Verification

ABUJA— THE Federal Government has fixed February 17 as the deadline for civil servants to validate their identity on the integrated payroll and personnel information system,...

FG To NLC: Tinubu Committed To Industrial Peace

News1 month ago

FG To NLC: Tinubu Committed To Industrial Peace

ABUJA — THE Federal Government has assured the organised labour especially, the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, that President Bola Tinubu was committed to industrial peace in...

Why 2025 Budget Was Increased To N54.2trn — FG

News1 month ago

Why 2025 Budget Was Increased To N54.2trn — FG

The Federal Government has explained that the increase of the 2025 budget from N49.7 trillion to N54.2 trillion was to have more revenue to strengthen the...

Abuja—The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has prayed the National Assembly to do all within its capacity to protect the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, from being abrogated under the Nigeria Tax Bill 2024. The union said it was deeply concerned about TETFund because the agency remained a positive testament to its constructive engagements with Nigerian governments since 1992. It insisted that it was its considered view that abrogating the TETFund Act 2011, by design or default, would be a great disservice not just to education but also to Nigeria as a nation. The association’s position was contained in a presentation by its president, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, on the second day of the public hearing organised by the National Assembly on Tax Reform Bills in Abuja, yesterday. In the presentation, titled “Debates on the Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024: Our Case for Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund,“ ASUU said it was worried over the proposed abrogation of education tax which, it claimed posed serious threats to the survival of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund. The presentation read: “The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has monitored with keen interest the debates about review of the tax system in the country, as proposed by the Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024, which is currently before the National Assembly. “Of particular interest to our union is the proposed abrogation of education tax which poses serious threats to the survival of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund,TETFund. “From any objective assessment, TETFund has been the backbone for infrastructural development, postgraduate training and research capacity building in Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions in the last one-and-half decades. “Over 90 per cent of capital projects in state and federal colleges of education, polytechnics and universities during this period were TETFund-sponsored. “The intervention agency has also remained the primary source of higher degree training for young academics and support staff since 2011 when the Act establishing the Education Tax Fund, ETF, was re-oriented to its original intendment of an intervention agency for the development of tertiary institutions in Nigeria. “ASUU is seriously worried that the education tax, called development levy, used to bankroll TETFund’s programmes, is about to be ceded to the newly established Nigerian Education Loan Fund, NELFUND. “Section 59(3) of the Nigeria Tax Bill (NTB) 2024 states that only 50% of the development levy would be made available to TETFund in 2025 and 2026, while NITDA, NISENI, and NELFUND would share the remaining percentages. ‘’TETFund will also receive 66.7% in 2027, 2028 and 2029 years of assessment but zero per cent in 2030 year of assessment and, thereafter, from 2030, all funds generated from the development levy will be passed to NELFUND! “With all sense of responsibility, ASUU finds this development not only worrisome but also inimical to our national development objective.” ASUU said its position was predicated on a number of reasons, which include the following: “Taking any percentage out of education tax (development levy) to service another agency not known to the TETFund Act 2011 is illegal and should not be allowed to stand. “Giving zero allocation of development levy to TETFund as from 2030 is a technical way of abrogating the agency; the purported admonishment that TETFund should seek innovative ways of generating its funds is spurious and ill-advised because as a creation of an Act, the institution dies without the fund. “Replacing TETFund with NELFUND is comparable to killing a parent to keep a newborn child alive; it is unethical and against the principle of natural justice. “The impact of TETFund on the campus of every tertiary institution in Nigeria is beyond description; abrogating it will take public tertiary education many years back and undermine the modest gains in repositioning Nigerian universities for global reckoning and transformative development. “Annual supports given to tertiary institutions by TETFund have substantially reduced industrial crises in many tertiary institutions; renovation of old facilities and provision of new ones and opportunities for staff development, leading to career advancement, have doused labour-related agitations on our campuses. “TETFund impacts not only tertiary-level education, but also the secondary, down to kindergarten; it directly and/or indirectly supports the production of quality teachers and different categories of support staff in the entire educational system. “The Ghana Education Trust Fund, GETFund, borrowed from the Nigerian experience, while some other African countries have recently visited to understudy TETFund. Nigeria should be improving on the operations and sustainability of the agency, not planning to emasculate or abrogate it.”

News2 months ago

ASUU Describes Tax Bill As A Threat To Public Education

The Zonal Coordinator of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) Yola Zone, Dani Mamman has sounded the alarm on the devastating impact of the Nigeria...