Nigeria’s university lecturers studying abroad under the sponsorship of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) have called on President Bola Tinubu to investigate the disbursement of a bailout fund approved for them by the presidency.
The scholars under the aegis of Omitted Foreign Scholars lamented that over 600 scholars, studying under the TETFUND sponsorship programme were omitted in the disbursement of funds designed as a measure to ease the burden of the rising foreign exchange rate.
The TETFUND had described that the scholars as impostors and blackmailers, insisting that it had paid all the genuine claims submitted by the lecturers under its foreign scholarship programme.
But reacting, the omitted scholars in a statement on Wednesday, September 4, co-signed by their executive members, Mal. Basheer Tijjani Shettima and Larry Awo, debunked the claim, saying they are not impostors.
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The statement reads: “TETfund lied in the report published by a National Daily when it claimed that we are impostors because we are not. Such a claim becomes irresponsible when no official of the Fund could give his or her name as the signatory to the press release which the reporter of the news report used to report the Fund’s false claim.
“We insist that we are not faceless and never imposters and we have our documents which are the evidence that substantiate our claims.
“We hereby appeal to President Bola Tinubu, Education Minister, Prof Tahoe Mamman, and our distinguished members of the National Assembly to set up probe panels on this development to ascertain which party between ours and TETfund is being truthful.
“For the records, we are 600 Nigerian foreign scholars who were supposed to be beneficiaries of President Tinubu’s bailout to foreign scholars affected by the unfavourable rising foreign exchange occasioned by the Covid-19 lockdown and other economic challenges.
“We are Nigerian foreign scholars under the sponsorship of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for M. Sc. PhD, Post-Doctoral and Benchwork studies and we have been left grappling with severe financial hardships since this ugly development happened a few months ago.
“We urge the new Board of the Fund to act swiftly on our case as we have already submitted our petitions to relevant authorities and are also available and ready to present more evidence of the authenticity of our claims”, it added.
