FG owes students on industrial training N11bn – ITF

The Director-General, Industrial Training Fund, Prof. Longmas Wapmu, has said the organisation owes students who had embarked on their Students Industrial Work Experience Scheme N11bn.

Wapmu, who spoke in Lagos on Thursday, explained that ITF owed the huge amount due to paucity of fund.

The DG also blamed the increasing number of students embarking on the programme and the new e-payment system introduced by the Federal Government for the huge debt of the organisation.

He said, “We have not achieved much progress in terms of clearing the backlog of accumulated SIWES allowance because the number of students continue to increase due to increase in the number of institutions. In fact what is being owed is about N11bn.

“But for the past two years, the government has now been given us sufficient money for each year. Previously, on the average, we required about N2.3bn for each year for the SIWES programme. But, we pay on the basis of first come first serve so we decided to pay some students who had graduated some years back.

“There is a new policy of e-payment by the Federal Government, whereby you don’t pay the students directly or by cash so you have to pay them through their bank accounts. We ask the students to open bank account but some of them did not rather, they used their parent account.

“So, when we are about to pay and check the record of the university, we realised that those who gave the name of their parents were not able to get the allowance because the accounts were not in their name as registered by the institution. We now have a new problem because the money was returned to the account and later refunded to us for payment.”

While assuring students of payment, he hinted that the allowances might not be paid to students on the programme from 2014.

He said, “What we are doing now is to compile the list of the students who could not get their money. We will publish it in about three national newspapers so that the students can come and correct their mistakes.

“There are possibilities that after the students on our list have been paid, we will stop paying the SIWES allowance as the Federal Government recently informed us that it may not be able to fund SIWES any longer. We recommended this too because even when we were not paying, students attended  the programme  with their parents’ assistance. If we stop, that will not affect them and it will stop the issue of owing students a large sum of money.”

Wapmu added that the Federal Government had concluded plans to put in place a National Education Framework that would align the various level of education.

This, he said, would bridge the gap between the industrial sector and the curriculum.

He added, “In Nigeria, we are very much after certificate but the National Qualification Framework intends to streamline all the qualifications. There are certain programmes that are being run by certain institutions but these are not graded. The National Qualification Framework will now bring the different types of training together.”

September 6, 2013 by Sodiq Oyeleke

http://www.punchng.com/news/fg-owes-students-on-industrial-training-n11bn-itf/

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Written by NEWSTRAWL ONLINE UPDATE

Sodiq Oyeleke is a Media, Human Resources, Project Management and Public Relations Practitioner