IGR spending: Reps to probe Education ministry, tertiary institutions

Not satisfied with the spending from the releases made from the 2012 budget to the Ministry of Education and some agencies under it, the House of Representatives yesterday queried the deployment and secrecy around the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) profiles of Ministries, Departments and Agencies.

Lawmakers also expressed concerns on how all tertiary institutions in the country channeled their whole IGRs to paying utility bills and maintenance; a cost which had already being captured in the 2012 budget.

The Chairman of the House Committee on Education, Hon Rose Oko, who made this observations at the 2013 budget defence of   MDAs in the edu cation sector, maintained that the trend was not the best and that those involved would be asked to refund such monies spent without approval of the National Assembly.

She declared that in terms of allocations to key sectors of the economy, education leads the pack with N426.53 b for 2013; therefore, the MDAs  have no reason to spend their internally generated revenue out of the budget.

The lawmakers, however, questioned the figures presented by the polytechnics as low compared to avenues open to these institutions to generate revenue.

The committee directed all MDAs in the education sector to submit their current and detailed IGR profile for proper scrutiny.

Oko said,"The National Assembly continues to decry the unusually high budget of the recurrent expenditure to the detriment of the capital. This exercise (budget scrutiny) should enable us to critical assess this and prune down areas of waste in the overhead budget and move them to capital."

 The educational panel chair stated that the budget allocation to education sector was defective as little attention was paid to Research and Development.

According to her, "Examples exist where almost all universities paid more attention to the construction of public schools, gates, fences in their 2013 Capital Expenditure Proposals as against obsolete and sometimes dilapidated infrastructure and other teaching and learning materials needed to add value to the products of such institutions”.

In the presentations to the committee by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) and Federal Polytechnics, 22 institutions captured posted a total of N4.949b in IGRs for 2012.

The Compass