The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has said that over N1.02 trillion was accrued to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) as accruals from the Education Tax Fund between 2019 and 2023.

Executive Secretary of NEITI, Dr Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, stated this, yesterday, in Abuja, during the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony between the agency and TETFund on information and data sharing.

Orju said that under the MoU, NEITI would work with TETFund to ensure timely and prompt remittances through the early deployment of evidence-based data.

He said the Initiative would also provide real-time information on revenue accruals due to the Fund to guarantee transparency and support in tracking remittances and utilisation.

The NEITI executive secretary, who stated that the joint efforts will uplift educational institutions, enhance access to scholarships, and strengthen the research ecosystem across public tertiary institutions, said: “The over N1 trillion that has accrued to TETFund in just five years must be fully accounted for, efficiently deployed, and transparently tracked. It must be translated to modern libraries, functional laboratories, revitalised lecture halls, and cutting-edge research that will meet the challenges of the 21st century.

“With this MoU, NEITI and TETFund commit to a future of joint accountability, open data exchange, and measurable impact. This is not just a partnership between two institutions—it is a covenant with the Nigerian people. A promise to ensure that Nigeria’s natural resource wealth truly works for every citizen, especially through education.”

Earlier, the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, said the epoch-making MoU was the culmination of ‘series of engagements’ between the two agencies.

Echono emphasised the need for clarity on tax compliance by companies to ensure they pay the correct amount of taxes, as well as revenue transparency in reporting to eliminate discrepancies between companies’ payments and their disclosures to the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).

He said that the collaboration aims to expand TETFund’s support for infrastructural development in tertiary institutions across Nigeria, leveraging NEITI’s credible data and expertise in financial auditing and revenue tracking.

“We’ve had various avenues of ensuring accountability, particularly in the oil and gas and other extractive industrial sector, to ensure that taxes that are due to be remitted to the educational tax fund are made and even those that they fail to make are recovered to boost revenue, to ensure that we are able to fulfill the purpose of the President in restoring our institutions in the shortest possible time. And being able to have a framework that will enable us to get accurate, credible and up-to-date data on what these should be is something we’re working very hard on,” he said.