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The Senior Staff Union in College of Education, Nigeria (SSUCOEN) has described a directive by Federal Government that Federal Colleges of Education must remit 40 percent of her Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) to government is capable of suffocating children of the poor.
According to a letter addressed to the Minister of Education which was signed by the president of SSUCOEN , Comrade Danladi Ali Msheliza, the union urge Federal government to own up to her responsibility of funding education in Nigeria.
Comrade Ali Msheliza demanded that government should reverse such policy if she wants to continue to train teachers in Nigeria.
The letter reads “The Accountant-General of the Federation sent a memo to all Federal Colleges of Education, titled “Implementation of 40% Automatic Deduction from Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of Partially Funded Federal Government Institutions.”
“The memo sated that the Honourable Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy (HMF&CME) has approved the implementation of a 40% auto deduction from the gross Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of all Partially Funded Federal Government Institutions.
“The memo further stated that “All statutory revenue lines like Tender Fees, Contractor’s Registration Fees, Disposal of Fixed Assets, Rent on Quarters, etc shall be remitted 100% (hundred percent) to the Sub-recurrent Account”.
“The Union wish to state that this makes absolutely no sense at all, because Education should not be “partially funded” rather, are supposed to be “fully funded” by the federal government, which established them.
“In spite of progressively vanishing support from the federal government that set them up, Colleges have managed to survive and live up to the demands of their mandate of training teachers for this country, by devising several means, including denying staff and students of most of their entitlements to survive and operating under excruciating teaching and learning environment.
“Tertiary Education is now rightly not for the poor. When government is supposed to give life support to our Colleges, they rather prefer to milk and draw the last blood of life, out of us.
“All the Adjustments in the revenue will now pass unto the parents because students have to be charged the 40% to each subhead as IGR to government. Otherwise, no College of education in Nigeria can survive.
“For the records, Colleges of Education do not have anything called IGR. What students pay (as paltry sums) are service charge for students ID card, hostel maintenance, games, etc.
“It is unbelievable and mind blogging to note that the federal government wants Colleges of Education who are barely struggling to survive, and whose overhead cannot even pay for diesel or electricity bills, not to talk of students hostels and other logistics, would be asked to remit 40% of what they collect as registration fee from students as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) to the federal government coffers to fund political elites’ indulgences.
“This action, which can be likened to squeezing water out of stone and deposit it into an ocean is, in our opinion, is a deliberate effort by government to systematically phase out Public Tertiary Educational Institutions in Nigeria just like they did to public Primary and Secondary Schools.
“President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is really having a ball at the expense of the rest of Nigerians. He has become so comfortable in his presidential villa that he now wants to deny the children of the masses access to quality Education.
“This is a cruel suffocation of federal Colleges of Education that are barely hanging on! It betrays not just a profound poverty of imagination but a studied design to snuff out the last evidence of life in our Colleges.
END.
