Benin city – House of Representatives committee on Basic Education has commended the Edo state government for the judicious utilization of the Universal Basic Education funds in the state.
The committee’s Team leader, Hon Istifanus Gyang, who said they were in Edo state to as part of their legislative oversight functions to assess the level of utilisation of the grant which he said gave them the opportunity to see for themselves the appreciable performance of the state over the years.
“We have been able to go round parts of the state and what we saw on ground is quite commendable.
Many States have not accessed the UBEC grant for many years now and Edo is one of them. What is due Edo is about N3.1B after paying its counterpart funds and with that a lot can still be achieved in the state. We want Edo state to take advantage of the available grant.”
Hon Gyang who described physical infrastructure and teachers in the Education sector as hardware and software respectively however tasked the state government and the SUBEB to do more in the area of human capital development especially in the training and retraining of teachers to complement the state government’s infrastructure development in the education sector which is rated high.
The state Deputy Governor Rt Hon Philip Shaibu who received the committee on behalf of the Governor, Mr Godwin Obaseki assured that the state government will access the grant, saying that government is already working on it.
While thanking the committee for their commendation and confidence in Edo state government said the state government is domesticating good governance,adding that the present administration will not relent in its efforts to consolidate on school infrastructure as well as upgrade and capacity of teachers to complement.
“We are trying to inject fresh blood into SUBEB that will be technology compliant. And our teachers have to be upgraded to be fully computer literate so as to be able to impact computer knowledge on the primary school children. We will continue to train and retrain our teachers and we want every primary school child in the state to learn the use of computer so that soon we begin to have paper less examinations at the primary school level.
He assured that the present administration will remain transparent in handling UBEC funds while seeking the national assembly’s cooperation in that regard.
