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From Tony Osauzo, Benin
Effort of the Governor Monday Okpebholo-led administration in rebuilding and renovating public schools in Edo State in the last one year has attracted over 1,000 students migrating 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.
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 had 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 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 schools enrolling into public schools.
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 had 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, had been paid.
“When we did the calculation, it came up to N4.6 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, the government was also paying N40,000 as stipends to students attending the states’ 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 and have been showing them on television since 2018, but they didn’t install them. What’s the use now? The essence is to make sure that the children of Edo State make use of the equipment so that when you are building something like tiles, you cannot bring people from Togo and Cotonu.” Dr. Iyamu revealed that most of the $70 million the state government got from the World Bank to fund EdoBEST education programme under the immediate past administration was used to fund consultancy.
The commissioner announced that backlogs of salaries owed lecturers of Usen Polytechnic since 2022 had been cleared by the Okpebholo administration, while internal roads of the Polytechnic built by the administration would soon be commissioned.
