The House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts has recommended excluding the National Examinations Council (NECO), the University of Ibadan (UI), and 22 other government agencies from the 2025 federal budget.
According to reports, this decision stems from allegations of unaccounted funds allocated to these agencies in 2024 and previous years.
Speaking during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily program on Thursday, the Committee Chairman, Bamidele Salam, explained that the move was prompted by the agencies’ failure to provide proper accountability for the funds received and their repeated refusal to respond to several summons from the House.
According to the lawmaker “The Public Accounts Committee as a constitutional committee of the House has a mandate to ensure accountability, to ensure probity, to ensure efficiency in the use of resources allocated to ministries, departments and agencies.
“Unfortunately, we have a situation where some agencies have become recalcitrant, refusing to honour invitations, refusing to honour summons, refusing to appear to account for previous allocations given to them in federal budgets, some in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
“One of the penalties specified by the Financial Regulations 2009 and other enabling laws on the issue of accountability in Nigeria is that ministries that refuse to account for monies appropriated by the National Assembly or refuse to honour invitations to render those accounts can be delisted from further funding and that is exactly what the Public Accounts Committee did by reviewing in the last few months those ministries, departments and agencies that have consistently refused to honour invitations or even submit documents which will authenticate their judicious and lawful use of resources previously allocated.
“For those, one of the appropriate measures as stipulated by our regulations is to stop further funding for them.
“Let me give you an example of the National Examinations Council (NECO). NECO has been given invitations up to five times by the Public Accounts Committee. They have neither responded to any of those invitations nor physically attended any of the summons. Same with every other agency, 24 of them listed in that resolution that was passed by the Public Accounts Committee as a recommendation for the delisting of these agencies from further funding.”
