The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has announced tougher measures against tertiary institutions that fail to complete projects funded through its intervention programmes, warning that defaulters will not receive approval for new projects under the 2027 funding cycle.
The decision was approved by the Fund’s Board of Trustees (BoT) as part of efforts to tackle persistent project abandonment, implementation delays and rising project costs that have reduced the impact of TETFund interventions across Nigerian tertiary institutions.
In a statement issued by the Fund’s Director of Public Affairs, Abdulmumin Oniyangi, the Chairman of the Board, Aminu Bello Masari, said the practice of allowing institutions to seek fresh intervention projects while leaving existing ones unfinished would no longer be tolerated.
Masari acknowledged that some projects were delayed due to the sharp increase in the cost of construction materials such as cement, reinforcement rods, electrical fittings and sanitary equipment. He noted that TETFund introduced a special intervention in 2023 to provide additional funding for such projects, leading to the completion of many previously abandoned works.
Despite that intervention, he expressed concern that several institutions continue to delay project execution, blaming the situation on leadership changes, where new administrators abandon inherited projects, as well as bureaucratic delays in processing payments to contractors.
He also warned that internal politics and administrative bottlenecks within beneficiary institutions would no longer be accepted as excuses for delaying projects financed with public funds.
To address the problem, the Board directed every beneficiary institution to prepare a comprehensive list of all projects that have remained uncompleted for more than six months beyond their scheduled completion dates. The institutions must explain the reasons for the delays, prioritise the affected projects based on importance and provide the estimated funds required for their completion.
The Board further instructed institutions to strengthen project monitoring by involving their physical planning and maintenance departments to ensure projects are completed on time, within approved budgets and in line with required quality standards.
Under the new policy, institutions with outstanding delayed projects will be required to use their annual, zonal and high-impact intervention allocations to complete those projects before applying for approval of new ones.
TETFund stressed that institutions with unresolved delayed projects will not be considered for fresh project approvals during the 2027 intervention cycle.
To ensure compliance, the Fund said monitoring teams made up of Board members and technical officials will carry out nationwide inspections of affected projects between August and September 2026. The exercise will assess the progress of the projects and evaluate completion plans submitted by beneficiary institutions ahead of the Board’s statutory meeting in October 2026, where projects eligible for inclusion in the 2027 intervention guidelines will be approved.
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