By Orji Sampson
The inability of Imo state government to pay the mandatory 50% counterpart fund to the Universal Basic Education Commission UBEC, has led to the state abandoning over N2bn laying fallow in the Central Bank.
Reports gathered suggests that Imo, Anambra, Edo and Ogun ranks among the top states that have the highest amount of fund left laying fallow with UBEC owing to their inability to pay the counterpart fund.
Even with the decay, shortage and dilapidation of infrastructure ravaging most public schools it is rather surprising that some states including Imo abandoned over N29 billion with Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC).
Trumpeta further gathered that affected states were said to have refused to pay the requisite 50 per cent counterpart fund in order to access the fund.
This paper also learnt that a document obtained from the headquarters of UBEC detailing the un-accessed matching grant from 2005 to 2020 as of August 17, 2021, indicated that the five states had refused to pay the requisite counterpart fund to access the over 10 billion cumulatively disbursed to them for implementation of Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme in their states.
“The document obtained from UBEC further revealed that other states with high amount of un-accessed fund are Niger, with N1.7 billion and Enugu, N1.56 billion. Other states have over N7 million each, apart from Bayelsa, Delta, Jigawa, Kaduna, Rivers, Kebbi and Zamfara, which have fully accessed their matching grants. The document also showed that over N500 billion was disbursed as matching grant to states from 2005 to 2020,” the online report stated.
