Edo State Governor Goodwin Obaseki has said that his administration would spend N6 billion on rebuilding secondary schools in the state between May and September next year.
He said it was unfair to expect that his administration in five or eight years would solve the problem of the state’s schools that has accumulated for over two or three generations.
Obaseki who stated this at the weekend while answering questions from journalists shortly after the closing ceremony of 2023 Edo School Week, said he wants to leave behind a well-articulated plan and directional plan on what need to be done and when to do it in the state education system.
“Between May 1 and September next year, all the fund I used for road for Seefor Project will now go to secondary schools and this is in excess of N6 billion for secondary alone. Unlike basic schools and junior school, we don’t have federal support for secondary schools.
“We have Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) supporting State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) but for secondary schools, there is no support, so we have to put up mechanism to rebuild all our secondary schools. But we would not be able to finish all the schools but we have started by having a financing plan.”
“What we have done is to start the process and set direction and hope that the citizens will hold the government accountable and responsible by ensuring that they deliver on what they expect within available resources somebody needs to pay for it,” he said.
According to him, it is humanly impossible to rebuild all the schools, classrooms, put furniture and have all the textbooks as required, adding that they have started making significant progress and have demonstrated that changing the education system is possible and not rocket science.
“We expect that the last phase of the project is to be able to have measures for learning outcomes, we have hired all the teachers and so on. This would enable us to measure what the children have learnt,” he added.
He said his administration is building an educational system that would guarantee that by the time a student leaves primary six in Edo, there are certain things the child would know, behaviour and decorum the child would imbibe and by the time he is leaving JSS 3, they would have built in him the basis to be successful in life.
“And the parent would measure, saying if my child graduate from primary six, then, I expect the child to move on to JSS I and by JSS III, that child would have made up his mind what he wants to do with his or her life and be able to succeed with the tools we have given the child in the last nine years.
“That is what I expect to leave behind so that when we are campaigning, we would say that, this is how to measure students’ performance, and it would no longer be whether there are schools or no schools, it is how these pupils are performing,” he said.
