The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, and other directors at his Ministry have been summoned by the House of Representative, on Thursday, over alleged frustration of the submission of financial audit reports of 2018 and 2019 by the Federal Polytechnic, Nekede, Imo State.
Wole Oke(PDP-Osun), who is the Public Accounts Committee, chairman, issued the summons on Thursday, in the course of taking submissions on the audited accounts of the Polytechnic from its Rector, Dr. Michael Arimanwa.
Arimanwa, told the Committee that he could not render audited accounts of the institution for years, because the Minister of Education, Dr. Adamu, through directors at the ministry, had dissolved the Governing Council of the institution, making the audit process for the years under review, impossible.
“Audit for 2018 and 2019, has not been done, because the tenure of the former External Auditor expired, and we had to engage another firm, but it had issues and the tenure of the former governing council elapsed, so we were told by the Ministry (of Education), that we should wait until a new Governing Council, is constituted.
“So within that time(2018-2019), we were running the Polytechnic, without a governing council and without audit”, he told the Committee.
Engr. Arimanwa also told the Committee that the Polytechnic generated about N4.9billion from 2018 to 2019, from the tuition of students and other services offered by the Polytechnic.
He, however, failed to give details on the expenditure of the fund and how much was realized from sells of drugs by the school’s Polytechnic.
He also failed to provide information on details of what the school received as Tertiary Education Trust Fund grants from the Federal government.
The Committee besides lashing at the Minister of Education for what they said was a breach of section 85(3) of the 1999 constitution, also queried the Polytechnic’s expenditure of N653million in only two years(2018-2019) for Internet infrastructure Consultancy services.
Section 85(3) says all agencies of government, must provide audit reports of their expenditure or budgets, not later than May 31st of the succeeding year.
The Committee resolved to carry out further oversight of the institution next week, to ascertain the claims on certain projects, as contained in their presentation to the Committee.
