The House of Representatives on Tuesday requested for the staff list and recruitment programme of the Industrial Training Fund from the organisation.
The Chairman of the House Committee on Industry, Husaini Abubakar, made the request when the ITF management appeared before members of the committee for defence of 2017 Budget in Abuja.
He said that the nominal roll of the workers was necessary to guide the committee in proper assessment of the budget and performance of the 2016 allocation to the Fund.
Abubakar advised the agency to explore Information and Communications Technology for its expansion programme, adding that it the committee needed knowledge of the agency’s strength and distribution of staff.
Abubakar said: “We need to have the nominal roll and the recruitment programme for this year so that you don’t flout the Appropriation laws.
“We have seen situations whereby agencies recruit workers that were not included in the Appropriation Act only to discover that six, seven months salaries could not be paid.”
The committee also questioned non-availability of details of line items in the budget.
Responding, Director- General of the Fund, Joseph Ari, said that the requested information was contained in the documents already made available to the committee.
He also explained that in spite of having 37 Area Offices and four training centres around the country, ITF was still not represented in some states.
Ari, however, said that it was the determination of the agency to redirect training of the nation’s youths towards technologically-inclined sectors.
He told the committee that the agency’s five industrial and model skills training centres were meant for technological growth of the country.
He said that poor funding had stalled the completion of the projects commenced in 2011, but stated that Abuja centre would be inaugurated before the end of the first quarter of this year.
According to him, the upgrade of Aba Area Office was also affected by funding issue, which was responsible for non-allocation of budget for it in 2017.
The director-general, however, said that being a hub of technological and industrial activities, Aba had been prioritised for upgrade by the agency.
The agency proposed about N40.41 billion for 2017 fiscal year, made up of N34.71 billion recurrent expenditure and N5.8 billion for capital expenditure.
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