The federal government, on Monday, officially engaged the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) for monitoring all intervention projects it awarded to contractors in tertiary institutions.
This came just as it purchased and donated a 36-seater coaster bus to the national leadership of the students’ union.
The government explained that engaging NANS on contract monitoring, was not only to ensure that quality jobs were done, but also for the timely execution of contracts carried out through its interventions in higher institutions of learning.
The Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Sonny Echono, while speaking at the presentation of the bus to the national leadership of the union, led by NANS’ President, Usman Umar Barambu, in Abuja, said students would henceforth be its eyes in their respective
institutions.
Echono, said the meeting with the national leadership of leadership was, “the continuation of our constant dialogue with stakeholders.”
He added: “Just as President Ahmed Tinubu has been preaching to the rest of us, the students are at the centre of any policy on education because education is about students.
“It involves those that teach but basically, every policy around education should be centred on students and how to prepare and how to engage them with the right skills and knowledge to be able to contribute meaningfully, to be able to contribute to society when they graduate.
“It is in the same light that TETFund is consulting with them to find out their needs, their expectations, their aspirations to guide our own recommendations to Mr. President to make the right interventions.
“Another very significant engagement we are having with students is the fact that we want them to be our eyes in their respective institutions.”
He added: “TETFund’s intervention translates to the execution of projects, to the implementation of various intervention lines and this all happens on campuses.
“So, we want a situation where if anything is going wrong in any project on campus, we should have multiple ways to be able to get information and one of those is through the students themselves who should be the beneficiaries of those interventions.
“So by our programme, we want to be able to identify on each campus, a contact person that would be able to liaise with our monitoring team and be able to engage. Sometimes, it will require us to just go visit a particular site to find out whether work is going on there or not, the quality of work and whether the contractor is actually there or not so we can have first-hand information and not when we wait for a school to apply for a particular tranche, then we send our team there and then discover that activities have already gone round.
“We feel that going forward, this will help even our monitoring process to be more transparent and more engaging. When people know that the students who are always constantly there are watching out and can have an avenue of letting TETFund know what’s going on, I’m sure those who are working on these projects will sit up and ensure that they do good quality work.”
Kuni Tyessi
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