The authorities of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Thursday said that plans were at the advance stage to build an ultra-modern headquarters in the central area of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja for the sum of N6 billion.
The Director, Finance and Administration of the Board, Alhaji Mufutau Bello, dropped the hint when he led its management team who appeared before the Public Accounts Committee, PAC of the House of Representatives Chaired by Hon Busayo Oluwole Oke (PDP-Osun) currently investigating audit queries raised by the office of the Auditor General of the Federation on the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) over the dwindling revenues of the Federal Government.
He disclosed that already the Board had been saving N2 billion annually since 2018 to raise the money to commence the project on time.
Alhaji Bello who said that the Board had realized N5.5 billion so far pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic had really affected the internally generated revenue of the agency in 2020.
According to him, “we are proposing to move our central headquarters to the central area (of Abuja). We have a plan of over N6 billion but since we don’t collect subvention from the government for our overhead and capital, so every year from 2018 we have been setting aside N2 billion, because our target is N6 billion to be able to acquire our headquarters in the central area.
“The money is in our Treasury Single Account (TSA) we had a challenge in 2020 because of COVID, so we could not realize our budget. So far we have realized about N5.5 billion.”
However, in a swift reaction, the Chairman of the Committee, Hon Oke, said that it was not wise to keep such an amount of money idle without investing it.
According to him, “you cannot keep such money idling in an account. That is poor treasury management, something has to be done about this.”