Executive Chairman of the Oyo State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Dr. Nureni Adeniran, has credited Governor Seyi Makinde’s administration with significantly reducing infrastructure deficits and improving the quality of basic education across the state.
Speaking at the Omituntun 2.0 Inter-Ministerial Briefing held at the Governor’s Office in Ibadan, Adeniran highlighted the administration’s strides in enhancing education at the primary and junior secondary levels since 2019.
He noted that the government’s prompt payment of counterpart funds to UBEC from 2019 to 2021 enabled SUBEB to undertake various developmental projects, including the construction of 289 classroom blocks, 60 model schools, renovation of 229 classrooms, and procurement of thousands of desks, teachers’ furniture, digital devices, and motorcycles.
According to him, over 13,800 teaching and non-teaching staff members have been trained, leading to a notable improvement in education delivery and increased enrollment in public schools. He added that many parents have withdrawn their children from private schools due to the improved standards in public schools.
Adeniran also commended the administration for tackling the issue of out-of-school children, revealing that approximately 60,000 children have been returned to classrooms under the current government’s efforts.
“There is no gainsaying that the vision of the Governor Seyi Makinde administration on the Basic Education sub-sector to have a very negligible number of out-of-school children in the state, is gaining momentum on a daily basis,” he said.
Speaking on how the government’s efforts have improved education during Omituntun 2.0, Dr Adeniran stated that “the state government has also graciously paid the counterpart funds for 2022 and 2023 to complement the released matching grants from the Federal Government through UBEC for the two years, which amounted to the sum of N2,600,237,314.29 only.”
He explained that the Board has got approval to execute projects in public basic schools across the 33 Local Government Areas of the state, including construction of 41 blocks of classrooms, seven perimeter fences, 30 boreholes, procurement of 5,828 pupils’ desks and benches, 473 teachers’ tables and chairs, 910 sports equipment as well as the renovation of 60 blocks of classrooms.
The SUBEB chairman added that apart from the SUBEB interventions, the state would also embark on another massive construction/renovation of classrooms through a reward fund it got for its involvement in the Better Education Service Delivery for All (BESDA) Programme, which sought to reduce out-of-school children.
He said, “All the states that benefited in the BESDA Programme were rewarded with funds and His Excellency, the Executive Governor, Seyi Makinde, decided and insisted that the reward should be utilised for the provision of infrastructure in public primary schools in the state.
“To this end, the Board has rolled out infrastructural projects which will soon be executed in the public primary schools in all the thirty-three (33) Local Government Areas of the State, and this will go a long way to improve both infrastructure and academic activities of these benefiting schools.”
Adeniran said these projects would include the construction of 28 blocks of classrooms, renovation of 29 blocks of classrooms, construction of a 4-compartment toilet with deep-well, sinking of 16 boreholes with tanks and tank-stands and the procurement of 2,922 desks and benches and 182 teachers’ tables and chairs.
Adeniran also noted that the administration recruited 5,600 teachers and 80 caregivers to address the shortage of teachers in the 2,508 public primary schools in the state, saying, “I wish to reiterate that the recruitment has gone a long way to improve the learning outcome in all the public primary schools across the state through academic performances and other extra-curricular activities.”
He maintained that the recruitment of new teachers has led to improved standards of education, saying “the situation is changing because we have newly-recruited teachers that have better orientation, that dress very well, that are more accustomed to the digital world, and so on and so forth.”
He added that the government has also introduced different policies to improve teaching and learning, training and capacity-building for teachers and other sorts of training.
Fielding questions from newsmen, Dr Adeniran said that the issue of infrastructure deficit in the education sector has been quite worrisome, but the government of Engr. Makinde has been making efforts to address the issue, a development which he noted has led to a massive reduction in the deficit.
He noted that some other efforts have also been lined up towards further reducing the education infrastructure deficit, saying, “When Engr. Makinde became the governor, and we were talking about the infrastructure deficit in education. So, we all agreed that we had to deal with it. The governor thinks that the peanuts that we pay as cash-off funds are not going anywhere.
“I have mentioned all the schools that SUBEB did. If you provide a book of the schools we have done, you say, ah, this governor has tried. But if you go out and see some dilapidated structures, you will say, what is this governor doing? When you consider the number I have given and if you remember that we have 2,506 schools, then it is an issue that will continue to recur.
“In the real sense of it, we have done very well, because if other governments had been fixing this number of schools, the situation would have changed.
“If you want to look at the pace of the UBEC/SUBEB, it won’t go anywhere. So, at the end of the day, our government decided to take a decisive step, and that was the reason the government established the office of the Special Adviser on Education Intervention, which is saddled with special intervention in education. AT UBEC/SUBEB, we will also continue with our own regular interventions.
“At present, a lot of work is going on in the area of special intervention. Before you know it, a lot of things are going to be fixed, because the government intends to approve N10 billion on a yearly basis for special intervention on education infrastructure. If that is done on a yearly basis, by 2027, we would have had a successful result.”
