Abia State Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Obinna Oriaku, says the recent sacking of the Governing Board, Rector and Registrar of Abia State Polytechnic, Aba, was informed by the need to save the school from total collapse. Oriaku, during an interaction with newsmen in Aba Monday, disclosed that Abia Poly was steeped in mismanagement and maladministration which has resulted in financial recklessness on the part of the management of the school. Workers in the school had embarked on indefinite strike last year to press home their demand for payment of their nine months salary arrears. This led to the closure of the school as academic activities were paralysed. In a move to sanitise the school and restore academic activities, Abia State Governor, Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu, penultimate week ordered the sack of the entire Governing Board for alleged misappropriation of fund and indiscriminate recruitment of workers without authorization. Ikpeazu followed up his action last weekend by directing the Rector and Registrar to proceed on six weeks compulsory leave. Oriaku said that government discovered that Abia Poly has a staff strength of 1, 200, with 800 being senior staff; 99 are security personnel, 44 are employed in the Library of the school while over 50 personnel work in the Medical Unit. According to him, the total monthly wage bill of the school stands at N180 million. He also said the school was discovered to be operating 44 accounts in 23 banks which were avenues for revenue leakages and financial recklessness, adding that decisions taken by authorities of the school in the past 20 years were now hurting the institution.

“I would not like to pre-empt the government. But being saddled with the finances of Abia State, I must say that you also need to get worried with what goes on in Abia Polytechnic.

“Their wage bill is N180 million. Consider Abia State University which with the number of Professors and the number of years it had existed, their wage bill averages N140 million with even a higher student population.

“When we came in, Abia Poly had 44 bank Accounts with less than 23 banks. That means that the school was destined to go the way we are seeing,” the Commissioner said.

“Now when we came in, we set up structures, and streamlined the account into one bank, UBA, and every student now pays through the school portal. But before now, payments were made with cash or through bank tellers where people also forged tellers.

“As at the last meeting there were about seven revenue accounts that are yet to be uploaded into that portal.

“They have about 44 staff in a library that is not up to the size of a Senior Advocate of Nigeria’s law library. They have almost 50 people in their medical unit with three or four matrons with doctors. That is recklessness on the part of those who ran the institution,” he added.

“The staff strength of that institution is about 1,200 out of that 800 are senior staff, which means that the top is very heavy. So, what is going on now is what should go on if you want to bring about change and you should expect more if you want that institution to survive,” he said. He hinted that the Ikpeazu administration would revisit the personnel audit reports of government agencies in the past and make them public to weed out ghost workers.

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