Fred Ezeh, Abuja
The Federal Government on Monday said that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has spent over N350 billion on its interventions in public basic education system in the last four years, as against N360 billion spent by previous administrations.
A report from the Federal Ministry of Education indicate that in 2015 matching and non-conditional grants disbursement to 15 states and the FCT amounted to N68.4 billion.
Similar disbursement to 29 states and the FCT in 2016 was N77 billion. And N95 billion was disbursed to 24 states and FCT in 2017. Additionally, N109 billion was disbursed to 20 states and FCT for unexplained reasons.
Minister of Education Mallam Adamu Adamu, who disclosed the information in Abuja, explained that the money was spent through the platform of Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) on matching grants, educational imbalance fund, special educational fund and good performance fund.
He said the funds were also spent on instructional materials fund, teacher professional development fund and UBEC implementation and monitoring funds across geopolitical zones.
The government was unhappy that, in spite of huge financial investment, the state of basic education system, infrastructure and otherwise, was not encouraging.
The minister said that corruption and lack of political will, among other reasons, were responsible for most states inability to provide counterpart funds to enable them access the matching grant provided by the Federal Government.
To this end, Adamu said the Government has decided to deduct from source, part of the last tranche of the Paris Club refund from all the states that are yet to access their monies from UBEC.
“If this attitude of deliberate refusal on the part of states to provide counterpart funding for basic education continues, then Federal government will have no choice than to sustain its strategy of deducting counterpart funding of states percentage from source,” the minister said.