Lawmakers to probe allocation to education in 2019

Opeyemi Adelere

The House of Representatives has indicated plans to probe budgetary allocation to the education sector in 2019.
The committee on basic education and services in the House made this known during a meeting over 2019 budget implementation at the ministry of education in Abuja.

Education Minister, Adamu Adamu, had stated during the meeting that only 40 per cent of the 2019 budget was made available to the ministry due to poor budgetary releases and time constraint.

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The lawmakers, led by the chairman of the committee, Julius Ihonvbere, observed that education was underfunded and appealed that education be funded at the local level by the 774 local governments.

The chairman said the less than 50 per cent given by the appropriation act was not sufficient to address the challenges in the sector, hence, the need for the intervention of local government at the basic level. He added that the utilisation of released funds must be monitored and harnessed on the right project.

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Adamu appealed to the National Assembly to have the budget increased by 15% in 2021, considering the level of decay in the system. He explained that a total of N634.5 billion was appropriated for education in 2019, with 42.96 per cent of capital released to the sector.

Speaking further, Adamu gave instances of amounts allocated to education in past year, and the proportion released to agencies; universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and unity colleges. According to the minister, in 2019, N25.2 billion of the N58,7billon allocated to the federal ministry of education was released to the agencies; with universities having N3bn of N11bn allotted to it, colleges of education N957.6m of N2.5bn appropriated to it while unity colleges received N5bn of the N10bn released for implementation of research project.

To meet the needs of agencies in the education sector, Adamu said N84.7bn was allocated to the ministry of education in the 2020 appropriation act.

Nigeria’s education sector is bedeviled with challenges of acute shortage of classrooms, hostel accommodation, laboratory facilities, inadequate teaching personnel, unqualified teachers, poor and inadequate provision of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facilities and lack of security infrastructure in the schools, among others.

He also expressed concern over the number of out-of-school children in the country. According to him, about 10.2 million are currently out of school, adding that the ministry would set up an education watch group to ensure that children were in school.