Onwuka Nzeshi
13 May 2008
Lagos — State governments and various State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEB), have been warned of the dangers in allowing education to collapse in the country.
Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Dr. Ahmed Modibbo Mohamed, who gave the warning during an interactive session with State Governors in Abuja, said the various state governments ought to brace up to the challenge of providing basic education for their citizens and save education from collapsing due to acts of omission or commission.
He explained that the interactive session became necessary because after three full years of providing the two percent Consolidated Revenue funds to States, the performance by the states in the sector had not been very encouraging.
While the state of infrastructure has marginally improved, he said the same could not be said of instructional materials and teacher professional development.
On the application of the intervention fund, he said the current sharing formula as approved by the Federal Executive Council in December 2005 provides that matching grants to states on 50 percent -50 percent basis would take 70 percent of the fund, Educational Imbalance would take 14 percent, another 5 percent goes to states adjudged as performing well, while 2 percent goes to states to support their efforts
for the education of physically and mentally challenged children. In addition, he said, the school feeding programme was expected to take 5 percent while the UBE implementation fund was pegged at four percent. On how the use of the fund, Modibbo noted that the UBE matching grant together with the states counterpart fund were expected to use 70 percent of the fund for infrastructural development, 15 percent for textbooks and working material and another 15 percent for Teachers Professional Development.
According to him, the Commission disburses and keeps track of the utilisation of UBE Intervention funds and state counterpart funds adding that as at March 2008,
14, 581 classrooms have been constructed in the states, 6, 000 classrooms were renovated, 545, 255 sets of furniture were provided, 2, 638 toilets were constructed, while about 294 boreholes were sunk.
The Executive Secretary also disclosed that more than 71,560,537 instructional materials were provided while 815, 885 teachers were trained. He however remarked that the states could do better, especially if the assistance from the federal government was put alongside state funds and properly utilised for basic education.
He also stressed the need to undertake massive community mobilisation to support government effort. He regretted that till date, some states do not recognise that the responsibility of basic education rests with the state.
Some of the key challenges facing basic education programmes in the state, Modibbo said, include, lack of full comprehension of the level of decay in basic education by the individual state and local government areas, lack of political will in some states and unnecessary political interference in the implementation of basic education or misinformation. Others are the non-constitution of the Universal Basic Education Board in some states and the frustration of the Federal Teachers' Scheme (FTS) in some states. The introduction of the FTS by the Federal government, he said, was to fill the gap temporarily because many states do not have sufficient qualified teachers to teach in their schools.
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