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Govt recovers 25 schools from land grabbers
From Tony Osauzo, Benin
The effort of the Governor Monday Okpebholo administration in rebuilding and renovating public schools in Edo State in the last year has attracted over 1,000 students to migrate from private schools to public schools in the state.
In the period under review, over 68 schools were either rebuilt or renovated across the three senatorial districts, while 25 schools were recovered from land grabbers.
The State Commissioner for Education, Dr Paddy Iyamu, who disclosed this in a chat with journalists in Benin City while speaking on the activities of his ministry, challenged those claiming that no such number of schools have been rebuilt to go to the schools and verify, adding that Edo National College is a new school built by the State Government.
“I think if you follow our ministry’s page, you’ll see some of them there that have been displayed. If you are very active online, you will also be seeing them.
“The governor has made it clear that we must give the children of the poor a seat at the table of success and in the last academic session we had over 1000 new students from the private sector, from the private schools enrolling into public schools.
“For instance in Army Day Secondary School, we had about 502 students, in Evbareke, we have about 350, you can go there and verify in Uyiosa they call the school oti ku but today we have over 300 students so only these three schools, if I put them together, it is over 1,000 then when you now talk about the other areas, if we accumulate all the figures together it will be much but so that they don’t say we are giving ambiguous figures, I just try to be moderate in my figures. So it goes to show you the commitment of His Excellency.
“It is the new schools that have attracted these numbers. It is the poor state of our schools that give some of these private schools the opportunity to exploit parents,” the Commissioner added.
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Besides, Dr Iyamu disclosed that 4,000 teachers who were engaged on contract basis for three years by the last administration and another 1,000 engaged by communities have been given full employment in the last one year by the state government.
In addition, he said N3 billion out of the N4.6 billion owed workers of the state College of Education which was shut down for restructuring by the last administration have been paid.
“When we did the calculation, it came up to 4.6 billion. I was afraid. I went to the governor, and he said no problem. They work for Edo, we will use Edo money to pay them and he immediately approved it.”
The Commissioner also spoke on technical education in the state and explained that some equipment bought in 2018 and distributed to technical colleges but left uninstalled, have now been installed. He said in order to encourage skills acquisition, government is also paying N40,000 as stipends to students attending the state’s technical colleges.
“All schools are now free in line with the United Nations SDG for free education. Then also free are the Technical Colleges. When we came, they were in sorry states. You have equipment that people procured they have been showing on television since 2018. They didn’t install them. What’s now the use? The essence is to make sure that the children of Edo State make use of that equipment so that when you are building something like tiles, you cannot bring people from Togo and bringing people for Cotonou,” Dr Iyamu said.
He revealed that most of the $70 million State Government got from the World Bank to fund EdoBEST education programme under the immediate past administration went to fund consultancy.
The Commissioner announced that backlogs of salaries owed lecturers of Usen Polytechnic since 2022 have been cleared by the Okpebholo administration while internal roads of the Polytechnic built by the administration would soon be commissioned.
