The House of Representatives Committee on Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Area Councils and Ancillary Matters, headed by Fred Agbedi Wednesday queried Director, FCT Area Council Staff Pension Board, Suleman Abdulrahman over extra-budgetary expenditure in 2024 fiscal year.
The committee, which was not satisfied with the explanation from the director, promised to embark on an oversight function to ascertain the execution of the budget.
From documents submitted to the committee by the Board, the pensioner cost total appropriation was N131,148,262 but it received N151,137,417.
But while responding to the query from the lawmakers, Abdulrahaman explained that this was due to variations in salaries as a result of the change in minimum wage.
According to him, “The personnel cost of all FCT staff is centralised with the treasury department and you are aware of the recent salary adjustments as a result of minimum wage which increased the total receipt. We are in touch with the treasury department to get the supplementary approval so that we can update our records.
“Principally what we do is that we superintend over pension matters in all the six area councils and LEAs. Payment of monthly pensions and other benefits that accrue to our prospective retirees.
“Our summary of the budget performance for 2024, we had a total of N1.1 billion which was the ceiling, which consists of the recurrent, the personnel and overhead.
“The personnel cost, we have 115 per cent budget performance. The overhead, we have 40 per cent performance, and we don’t have capital projects. It’s just a service organisation on change of monthly pensions,” he said.
