2025 Budget: Only Performance Should Justify Demands For More Funds – Reps Tell NBTE, Others
By Juliet Vincent
The House of Representatives Committee on Federal Polytechnics and Higher Technical Education has maintained that, performance is key to progress and should be used to justify demands for more funds by agencies in 2025.
Chairman of the Committee, Rep. Fuad Kayode Laguda stated this after a presentation by the Executive Secretary, National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Professor Idris Bugaje at the 2025 budget defence session held by the Committee.
He noted that, there was need for government agencies to judiciously utilize resources available to them before asking for more as their performance should determine why more resources should be allocated to them.
Rep. Laguda said, “Performance is very key. And that is what will help us move forward in 2025. It is an acceptable and known fact that the polytechnics are poorly funded. We know. But we need to justify our need for more and show why we need more. To be honest with ourselves, have we been able to do that? That is what we should answer.
“And if we speak with each other truthfully, we know we are not doing good in that aspect. Not all of us, but most of us are not doing good in that aspect. The whole essence of this committee is to bring out the best in us. And to put corrective measures where it is needed”.
He said, that, NBTE as a body is very crucial in the area of technical education, hence, adequate funding for the agency will go along way in ensuring that technical education institutions are positioned to provide Nigeria with needed expertise and workforce to drive innovation and development. He also used the avenue to seek for better synergies within the polytechnics, the polytechnics and various stakeholders. Charged the Rectors to be more proactive and introduce modern courses, syllabus and relevant courses to their immediate environments.
Earlier, the Executive Secretary NBTE, Professor Idris Bugaje had while presenting an overview of the agencies 2024 budget performance and the 2025 proposed estimates called for an increase of its budgetary allocation to recruit more personnel in order to supervise the activities of over 700 Polytechnics and other institutions across the country.
According to him, operations of the agency are being hampered by inadequate manpower to carry out its mandate as such, there is need to have more staff to do the job.
Prof. Bugaje said, “For personnel, we are looking for an improvement because we have about 700 institutions to visit and our staff strength is at 330, which is very low. Similar agencies like ours have more staff fewer institutions and more funds to carry out their duties, but our personnel cost is very low, so we want that one to be increased so that we can inject more hands to do that rotation”.
Speaking on the agency’s Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), he said there are charges being paid by institutions which he said are not constant but based on some activities and is charged during accreditation visits and some other activities.
The Executive Secretary, NBTE added, “It’s only when we go for accreditation we charge service charge. Before 75,000 we have increased to 150,000 per program. And then we give 50% to the federal government. For the whole year we ended up with 25 million Naira in IGR. Which is dismally low.
“We have about 200 programs, which also need to be increase, introduce contemporary ones. it’s not every year we visit every Polytechnic on all these programs. every outing. so for that reason for this current year our IGR is extremely low, just about 25 million or so. Our Capital performance for 2024 is 50 percent. We are yet to get the remaining 50 percent,” he said.
