Fiscal Responsibility Commission (FRC) has called on the management of the National Eye Centre, Kaduna to improve its remittances to the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
Leader of the ongoing North-West Federal Government physical project verification team, Bello Aliyu Gulmare made the call while performing the verification exercise at the National Eye Centre, Kaduna.
According to Gulmare, the team was in Kaduna not only to verify the Federal Government projects in the Center but also to verify the revenue performance of the Centre viz-a-viz revenue generation and remittance to the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF).
He encouraged the Centre to make sure it collects receipts on every kobo remitted into the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) as that is the only evidence acceptable to the commission.
The leader of the team, who is also the Head Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate of the Commission, explained the verification exercise was designed to give a fillip to the good agenda of the present administration in the area of prudence, value-for-money, transparency, and accountability in the efforts to meet the yearnings of the people.
The verification, he continued, must also be done within the ambit of the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), and the reason for this, he explained was to ensure that government embarks on projects that it could fund, adding that with adherence to MTEF, cases of abandoned projects will be greatly minimized.
The verification exercise is to determine projects that needed funding in line with the completion targets and to reduce to the barest minimum, approvals for new capital projects for Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) where the existing indebtedness to contractors is yet to be resolved by the concerned authorities.
He observed that in terms of patronage, the National Eye Centre, Kaduna is greatly underutilised and suggested the Centre comes up with better ways of marketing its services to the public, stressing the need for general awareness of its services.
The team leader from FRC commended the Procurement Unit and the Finance and Account Department of the Centre for their efforts to apply fiscal discipline in their day-to-day activities, and went further to suggest to the Management to periodically send, for more training/capacity building for the Procurement staff to enable them to do excellently well in their beat.
Some of the projects verified in the Centre include the rehabilitation and repairs of 50 rooms hostel accommodation for students, the rehabilitation of 110-seater lecture theatre, the rehabilitation of 14 rooms of transit hostels for medical doctors, and the purchase of health medical equipment for eye tests and surgeries like the operating microscope, Optical Coherence tomography angiography, and other medical laboratory equipment.
In his remarks, Abdulkadir Mohammed Kabir, Director of Administration who represented the Chief Medical Director, who was on another engagement described the Centre as the best and most sophisticated eye care facility in the Country which started as a mere eye Clinic to the biggest modern theatre in the whole of West Africa.
