By Suleiman Yakubu

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has engaged the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) to monitor its projects in tertiary institutions across the country.
The Executive Secretary, TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono, while presenting a 30-seater bus to NANS in Abuja on Monday, said this was necessary to put contractors on check.
Echono said that the fund was also committed, through constant dialogue with NANS, to meeting students’ needs, noting that they are at the centre of any education policy.
”Education is about students and how to equip them with the right skills and knowledge to contribute to their development.
”TETFund is consulting with them to find out their needs, and with significant engagement, we want them to be our eyes in tertiary institutions.
”This is because when something is given on our campuses, we should have multiple means of getting the information we want.
”We want to identify on each campus a contact person to confirm whether our intervention is yielding fruit,” he said.
The executive secretary said that the fund also had a similar engagement with staff unions to help monitor projects on campuses with the aim of harvesting expectations.
He added that the fund would continue to work with students to improve student accommodation through Public Private Partnership (PPP) and the private sector.
He said that the donation of the bus was to address transportation issues on campuses.
Responding, the National President of NANS, Usman Barambu, commended the fund for donating the bus following their request to President Bola Tinubu a few weeks ago.
Barambu said that students don’t actually benefit directly from TETFund, and so he laid out this particular complaint, which had yielded results.
He assured the fund to put a thorough check on TETFund projects on campuses while also ensuring contractors carry out their assigned contracts dutifully.
"TETFund has been helpful to higher education.
”When we tabled our request with the president, we said to him that over 90 percent of projects executed in tertiary institutions are done by TETFund.
”We will ensure we do our best to monitor the contractors on our campuses for proper monitoring of projects.
”There should also be a disciplinary measure put in place to sanction contractors that deviate from what they are supposed to do,” he said.

By Suleiman Yakubu

The Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) says plans are under way to fill up potholes and intervene in the repair of failed roads nationwide as the rainy season sets in.
The acting Managing Director of FERMA, Mr. Godson Amos, made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) today in Abuja.
According to him, the intervention was necessitated because of the need to ameliorate the hardships and delays road users face daily.
He was optimistic that the intervention would be achieved within six weeks of its commencement and that all potholes and road failures would be worked on on federal roads across the country.
He said he had gotten reports across the country of the deplorable Federal Roads across the country, which had caused a lot of inconvenience to road users.
He added that these failures have hampered economic activities due to the people's inability to freely move goods from one place to another.
”The failures on the roads are mostly caused by the incessant rainfall being experienced in many parts of the country, which results in the cutting off of road embankments and the collapsing of many carriageway sections at many locations across the country.
Also, excessive traffic, overloaded vehicles, and the age of the roads are other factors that have contributed to the dilapidation of the federal roads.
“This hinders the free flow of traffic, causing colossal damages to vehicles, wastages of productive man hours, and huge discomfort to road users.
“Our engineers in the Field Offices have already carried out a route condition survey of the Federal Roads and have identified all critical failures like road embankments washout and failed carriageway sections for the agency to take action.”
Speaking on how the agency would execute this intervention, Amos said direct labour would be deployed by engaging skilled and unskilled youths in the communities.
He further said that appraisals have been made, including the assessment of work requirements and the estimation of resources like men, materials, and machines that will be deployed to achieve the most cost-effective result.
Amos said that in order to ensure that maximum results were achieved, the agency had designed a good monitoring mechanism for effective and efficient monitoring of all the projects nationwide by deploying a management team for inspection.
He urged the media to give effective coverage to the activities of the agency and other stakeholders to partner with the agency to ensure that citizens have a stress-free and enjoyable travel experience on our highways.
The chief executive of FERMA, however, said funding was a challenge in the maintenance of the 36,000 kilometres of federal highways all year round.
NAN reports that FERMA is an agency that was set up for the monitoring and maintenance of all federal roads in Nigeria.