The House of Representatives yesterday queried the deployment and secrecy around the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) profiles of Ministries, Departments and Agencies in the educational sector, including tertiary institutions.
Federal lawmakers raised concerns over a curious trend where virtually all tertiary institutions in the country channelled their total IGRs to paying utility and maintenance bills, costs already captured in previous budgets.
These were fallouts of the? Hon. Rose Oko-led House Committee on Education meeting on the 2013 budget defence by MDAs in the education sector. In terms of allocations to key sectors of the economy, education leads the pack with N426.53 billion for 2013.
In a submission to the House panel by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) and federal polytechnics, the 22 institutions captured in the budget posted N4,949,075,112 billion in IGRs for 2012.
The lawmakers, however, questioned the figures presented by the polytechnics as low compared to avenues open to them to generate revenue.
To this end, the education panel directed all MDAs in the education sector to submit their current and detailed IGR profile for proper scrutiny.
“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 acting Chairman House Committee on Education declared in her opening remarks.
The educational panel chair stated that the budget allocation to education sector was defective as little attention was paid to Research and Development.
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