Gulu University Budget Falls By Shs 4 Billion

Gulu University management won’t be able to implement several key infrastructural projects in the financial year 2022/23 due to budget shortfalls of about 4 billion Shillings.

This comes as the University council passed a draft budget of 53.7 Billion shillings for the financial year 2022/23, on Thursday, a downtrend from 57.7 billion Shillings passed in the financial year 2021/22. This has left several proposed projects either underfunded or even unfunded.

For instance, no funds have been allocated for the construction of a teaching Hospital budgeted at 7 billion Shillings and equally, no funding was allocated for the recruitment of academic and administrative staff despite the university’s staffing level standing at only 25 per cent. The recruitment was estimated to cost 6.13 billion Shillings.

Equally, only 1.6 billion out of 12.14 billion Shillings was allocated for the continuation of construction of the central teaching facility while only 500 million instead of 4 billion Shillings is budgeted for the compensation of project-affected persons to pave way for the establishment of Gulu University Constituent college in Moroto.

Gulu University Secretary David Obol Otori told Uganda Radio Network in an interview that the cut is a blow to projects that the University is already implementing and may affect ongoing works in the Faculty of Agriculture. He however adds that the cut is majorly due to the reduced development budget, domestic arrears, and efficiency savings.

According to Otori, the contractor had already threatened to abandon the site due to delayed payments when the University suffered a loss of 6.4 billion Shillings this financial year due to cuts on its development budget.

Otori says the University needs an additional 10 billion Shillings in funding from the government to facilitate the completion of the building if the contractor is to be maintained on-site.

Gulu University Vice-Chancellor Prof. George Openjuru says the University is expanding exponentially arguing that budget cuts on development put the University in the wrong spot. He says the student population at the University is growing rapidly which calls for more funding for teaching space and teaching staff.

According to Prof. Openjuru, this financial year alone, they have a population of about 7,000 students with about 3,000 who recently joined in year one alone.

Prof. Openjuru says despite their local revenue (Non-tax) increasing from 13 billion to more than 18 billion Shillings a year, the figure isn’t reflected on the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), an annual, rolling three-year-expenditure plan that sets out the medium-term expenditure priorities and hard budget constraints against which sector plans can be developed and refined.

He says the government has to open up MTEF so that unfunded priorities are reflected to enable the University to generate local funds.

According to the University’s draft budget, wages took a lion’s share with an allocation of 35.9 billion Shillings followed by Non-wage allocated 15.2 billion Shillings while development lagged was allocated only 2.5 billion Shillings.

-URN