Budget padding: Agric research institutes blame legislators

 

Some heads of National Agricultural Research Institutes ( NARIs) have expressed their dissatisfaction on the budget padding that usually overshot their actual financial projects being spent annually, and thereby runs contrary to the best international practices.

Food Farm News interactions with some of the research institutes executive directors confirmed the nefarious act that they described as being criminal, and also undermining the integrity of the technologies and innovation centres in Nigeria.

They accused the National Assembly members of being major culprits of inputting uncorrelated constituency projects into research mandates, adding all efforts against it had been hitting a strong fence.

Many of the paddling inclusions happened after we must have submitted the budget proposal for financial appropriation, said one of the executive directors.

Another one said to us that they are helpless, and thereby indicted the anti graft agencies for not doing their jobs with other budget implementation monitoring  organizations, saying that their mandate are to detect all these misappropriations with immediate sanction.

Also another one of the overall bosses of the institutes in the South that we didn't want to mention his name said that " The act of padding the budget of research institutions to accommodate items irrelevant to their mandate is counterproductive to the country as there was nothing the Institutes could do to stop it as it is shortchanging the release of fund to our system"

He said further that " Usually it was after the defense of the budget as submitted by the institutes that the inanities happened, with the budget being saddled with items irrelevant to the mandate of our organizations"

Another ED also confirmed the atrocity in his organization and passionately expressed his dissatisfaction as he was even ready to face any anti graft penal against the perpetrators.

He said this when asked by us about the padding of his organization's budget that " The story was true and for two consecutive years now, the institute had not been able to execute any project for lack of funds partly due to budget padding for execution of irrelevant projects"

He stressed further that padding has been the reason why fund release to many organizations is difficult.