NDA suffers N1.3bn budget shortfall in 2018 – Commandant

Tunde Opalana, Abuja

The Nigeria Defence Academy (NDA) suffered a drastic reduction of N1.3 billion from its 2018 budget releases, its Commandant, Major -General Adeniyi Oyebade has said.

Maj. –Gen. Oyebade, who made this disclosure when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Defence to defend the academy’s 2019 budget, said the shortfall had handicapped the institution from paying non -regular allowances to its personnel.

He said the N1.3billion shortfall in 2018 budget releases, affected hazard, responsible and excess workload allowances.

“Aside the N1.3billion shortfall, out of the N8.9billion capital votes appropriated for the academy in the 2018 fiscal year, only N4.1billion has been released so far, making the implementation performance within the capital component to be 47 per cent as at this month, ” he said.

The commandant added that N9.0billion capital expenditure budget proposal made by the academy for 2019 fiscal year was reduced to N8billion by the Ministry of Budget and National Planning.

Some of the capital projects to be carried out by the academy in the 2019 capital expenditure component of the proposed budget, he said, include, counter terrorism and counter insurgency village, NDA sports complex and the construction of an earth dam.

However, the committee chaired by Senator Abubakar Kyari (APC/Borno North), observed that while personnel cost component of the academy’s budgetary allocations for 2018 was N8.146billion, the proposed estimates for 2019 is N8.072billion, wondering whether the academy suffered any depletion in its staff strength.

Meanwhile, the federal government has been held culpable for poor implementation of past budgets especially that of 2018.

Chairman, Senate Committee on Information, Sen. Suleiman Adokwe (PDP/Nasarawa South) made the blame while addressing journalists shortly after the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, defended his ministry’s 2019 budget before the committee.

He said that “before the budget defence exercise, we have done a bit of oversight functions and we noticed that releases for capital projects were quite low. Most of the agencies that we visited received between 10 and 15 per cent releases.

“Based on our interactions with the various agencies of government, we have discovered that capital releases are still very low. So far, the highest I have seen, the highest release is 67 per cent.”