By Felix Khanoba
Taraba State Governor, Agbu Kefas, has appealed to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) to establish e-library and entrepreneurship training centres in higher education institutions in the state.
The governor, who made the appeal during a visit to the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono, in Abuja, on Friday, also solicited for the establishment of Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres in the state.
He said : “I am here to solicit for establishment entrepreneurship centres in Taraba State to be able to train our youths to be self-employed.
” (I am here) to also ask for Computer Based Test centres to be able to accommodate more of our students in writing JAMB and other computer based exams in Taraba, and lastly to ask for e-library in Taraba.”
Governor Agbu, who commended TETFund for its massive intervention projects across tertiary education institutions in the country, said he is fully committed to transform the education sector in Taraba.
” In my agenda, the priority is education, and if you look at our region educationally there is a major problem. We have huge human resources that are untapped and I have discovered that one of the huge reasons for insecurity is lack of education.
” They said in Taraba we have one of the highest numbers of out-of-school children, so if at the primary and secondary levels, we don’t harvest these children, we can’t even invest in the higher institution and you will discover too that your own job will be affected and that is why I declared free and compulsory primary and secondary school education in Taraba and by the grace of God when I am done with the plans I have on ground, I will like you to come and see what we are doing there.
“For the higher institutions, I have also discovered that a lot of our children that their parents cannot afford to pay their school fees, and some of them are dropping out of school. We have some students in school but they are not in school, they don’t attend classes, they are moving about taking all sorts of drugs, to reduce that I have to declare half of school fees in all our tertiary institutions.”
Responding, Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc. Echono, commended the governor for for his various efforts to uplift education in the state.
While promising to look into the requests of the governor, Echono said TETFund has continued to deliver various intervention projects in both federal and state tertiary institutions in Taraba.
“We have been making our contributions to tertiary institutions in your state, in terms of physical infrastructure, academic staff training and development and some of your institutions have also done well in accessing our national research grant as well as in the publication of books and journals…..
“As far back as 2018, we have some major impact projects implemented there and this year, one of the few institutions with high impact intervention is Federal University Wukari, I think we made N3 billion available to them to execute high impact projects and that is being done as I speak.
“The Taraba State College of Education, Zing, (that the provost is here), I want to commend him because he is up to date in accessing what has been made available to him and he also made some request which is being favourably considered.
” On Taraba State polytechnic, Suntai, we are focusing on the issue of security,” Echono said, adding that the *the Polytechnic in Bali is benefiting from some of our interventions and they want to address issues around power.”
