The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has urged Nigerians to resist the proposed tax reform bills that are before the national assembly.
The union alleged that the bill would destroy public institutions in the country.
The Benin Zonal coordinator of the association, Monday Lewis-Igbafen, stated this while addressing a press conference during the weekend.
According to him, the gradual phasing out of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFUND, as proposed in the bills, will kill education.
“ASUU is alarmed by Section 59(3) of the Nigeria Tax Bill (NTB) 2024, which states that only 50 percent of the Development Levy would be made available to TETFund in 2025 while NITDA, NASENI, and NELFUND would share the remaining percentages.
“The consequence of this section is that TETFund will receive 66 percent in 2027, 2028, and 2029 years of assessment and zero percent thereafter, especially from 2030,” he said.
Mr Igbafen said education is a public good, and the government must not be allowed to destroy Nigerian tertiary education.
While condemning the contents of the bills, he claimed they are inimical to the well-being “of the education of our people because of its danger to the continued existence of TETFund.
“As a union of intellectuals, we vehemently reject this tax reform bill, especially for its attempt to erode the concrete relevance of TETFund to the infrastructural development, postgraduate training, and research capacity building in Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions.
“TETFund is relevant in the transformation of tertiary institutions in the country. Since its formation, it has remained the cornerstone of the rapid transformation of tertiary institutions in terms of manpower, infrastructural, and academic development.
“While the Nigerians are in the wilderness over the recalcitrance of the government to resolve the unresolved issues arising from the 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement, our union, ASUU, is worried by the inclusion of the ‘death” of TETFund, effective from 2030, in the tax reform bill that has become an albatross to the Tinubu government.
“We are calling for mass resistance against this potent threat to the life-wire of tertiary education in our country because the impending abrogation of TETFund will take public tertiary education many years back and undermine the modest gains in repositioning Nigerian universities for global reckoning and transformative development.”
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