The Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, has barred beneficiary institutions with abandoned or delayed intervention projects from accessing new funding under the 2027 cycle.
The Fund’s Board of Trustees adopted the measure as part of a broader push to end years of project delays, cost overruns and poor implementation across Nigeria’s tertiary institutions.
Director of Public Affairs, Abdulmumin Oniyangi, disclosed this in a statement Wednesday, quoting Board Chairman Aminu Bello Masari as saying institutions can no longer pile up new projects while old ones remain unfinished.
Masari acknowledged that some delays stemmed from rising costs of construction materials, including cement, reinforcement bars, and sanitary and electrical fittings. He recalled that the Board created a special intervention line in 2023 to tackle such cases, which helped complete several previously abandoned projects.
But he said delays have persisted in many institutions, blaming poor continuity between successive heads of institutions who abandon inherited projects for new ones, along with bureaucratic bottlenecks that slow contractor payments. He warned that internal politics and red tape would no longer be tolerated on projects funded with public money.
To fix the problem, the Board approved new directives requiring every beneficiary institution to compile an inventory of projects stalled more than six months past their completion dates, explain the delays, and propose solutions. Institutions must also rank the projects by priority and provide cost estimates for completion.
Each institution will now need a dedicated supervision mechanism, involving its physical planning and maintenance departments, to keep projects on schedule, within budget and up to standard.
Under the toughest of the new rules, institutions with delayed projects must direct their annual, zonal and high-impact intervention allocations toward finishing those projects before applying for new ones. No institution with outstanding delayed projects will be admitted into the 2027 intervention cycle.
TETFund said monitoring teams made up of Board members and technical staff will inspect affected projects nationwide between August and September 2026, assessing progress and completion plans ahead of the Board’s statutory meeting in October, where the 2027 disbursement guidelines will be finalised.
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