Institutions with stalled buildings face a funding freeze until they clear their backlog of unfinished work.
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has issued a stern ultimatum to Nigerian universities, polytechnics, and colleges: complete your abandoned projects or forfeit future funding.
In a decisive move to end decades of waste and inefficiency, the Fund’s Board of Trustees (BoT) has barred institutions with lingering, uncompleted projects from receiving approvals for new interventions in the 2027 cycle. The ruling, announced by TETFund’s Director of Public Affairs, Abdulmumin Oniyangi, signals a zero-tolerance policy on what the Board calls “avoidable delays.”
Board Chairman, Aminu Bello Masari, declared that the practice of accumulating fresh projects while old ones rot away is over. While acknowledging that some delays were caused by volatile prices for materials like cement and steel—which prompted a special intervention fund in 2023—Masari noted that the primary culprits are now internal.
“We have recorded success with the 2023 intervention, but delays persist largely due to a lack of continuity,” Masari stated. He criticized heads of institutions who abandon inherited projects to launch new ones, as well as bureaucratic bottlenecks that slow contractor payments, stressing that “internal politics and administrative red tape will no longer be allowed to frustrate public funds.”
To permanently tackle the crisis, the Board has approved a raft of immediate, strict measures:
· Full Disclosure: All institutions must submit a comprehensive inventory of projects that have exceeded their completion dates by over six months, including clear reasons for the delays and practical solutions.
· Prioritization: Beneficiaries must rank these stalled projects by priority and provide detailed cost estimates for their completion.
· Supervision Overhaul: Institutions are required to establish robust monitoring mechanisms involving their physical planning departments to ensure projects stay on schedule and within budget.
· Mandatory Reallocation: Most critically, annual, zonal, and high-impact intervention allocations must be channeled toward finishing old projects before any new applications are considered.
To ensure compliance, TETFund will deploy joint monitoring teams comprising Board members and technical officials for nationwide inspections between August and September 2026. The findings will be reviewed in the Board’s October 2026 statutory meeting, which will determine which projects make it into the 2027 disbursement guidelines.
The message is clear: the era of starting new projects while leaving old ones to crumble is officially over.
