The House of Representatives Committee on Federal Polytechnics and Technical Education has tied performance to the allocation of more funds in the 2025 budget.
Chaired by Mr. Fuad Kayode Laguda, the committee made this known after a presentation by the Executive Secretary of the National Board for NBTE, Prof. Idris Bugaje at the 2025 budget defence session held by the Committee.
Laguda who acknowledged that the polytechnics are poorly funded stressed the 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.
He said, that, NBTE as a body is very crucial in the area of technical education, hence, adequate funding for the agency will go a long way in ensuring that technical education institutions are positioned to provide Nigeria with the needed expertise and workforce to drive innovation and development.
Calling for synergies within the Polytechnics, and various stakeholders, he charged the Rectors to be more proactive and introduce modern courses, syllabus, and relevant courses to their immediate environments.
Bugaje while presenting an overview of the agency’s 2024 budget performance and the 2025 proposed estimates called for an increase of its budgetary allocation to recruit more personnel to supervise the activities of over 700 Polytechnics and other institutions across the country.
According to him, the operations of the agency are being hampered by inadequate manpower to carry out its mandate as such, there is a 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 charges are being paid by institutions which he said are not constant but based on some activities and charged during accreditation visits and other activities.
The Executive Secretary, NBTE added, “It’s only when we go for accreditation we charge a 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 increased, 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.”
