Budget Submission Row: UNIABUJA Governing Council Queries Bursar, Director

A fresh crisis is brewing at the University of Abuja (UNIABUJA) as the institution’s governing council is at loggerheads with the management over budgetary matters.

At the heart of the new crisis is the allegation by the council that the budgetary allocations for the current year were made and submitted to the budget office of the federation without reference to the council.

The governing council, headed by a former executive secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission, Ahmed Modibbo, is accusing the AbdulRasheed Na’Allah-led management of undermining its authority.

The council, last week, directed Na’Allah, former two-term vice-chancellor of Kwara State University, to query the institution’s bursar, Rufai Baba, and the director of the physical development department, Sadiq Shuaibu.

However Modibbo who is a professor of history, says there is no conflict in the university when contacted by journalists on the matter. He said the governing council only challenged an attempt to undermine its power and statutory role.

The university’s new governing council was appointed in July but since it came on board there have been frequent instances of disagreement with the university management.

Modibbo, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening, described the action as illegal and unacceptable.

He said by the act establishing the university, the governing council, through its finance and general-purpose committee (F&GPC) is empowered “to ensure judicious and appropriate use of all funds and monitoring of the university’s expenditure.”

The chairman said the governing council is also responsible for the approval of budgets of the university before it is passed on to the budget office, noting that until such is done, the management does not have the right to allocate available funds to specific projects.

He said the UNIABUJA management simply uploaded what was allocated to the university directly to the budget office without recourse to the council.

In his words “We thought that was undermining the position of the council and we took exception to that and demanded an explanation. We invited the concerned officials to an emergency meeting and both the bursar and the director of physical planning tried to provide an explanation that was not satisfactory to the F&GPC and the governing council as a whole.

“The council simply told them to do the right thing, but in the process, we discovered that they allocated huge sums of money to a project that wasn’t even essential as a priority project and it is also not an ongoing project which the guideline specifically indicated. But if they had come before the council, all these things would have been corrected to save the university from embarrassment.”

He said the council has suggested the reallocation of the fund to cater for the construction of more lecture theatres and that the authorities at the budget office of the federation had already approved the request for the reallocation.

Meanwhile, dissatisfied with the response provided by the bursar and the director of physical development, Messrs Rufai and Shuaibu, the council, last week, instructed the UNIABUJA vice-chancellor to query the officials.