BY Favour Nnabugwu & Awa Nnenna
Indications emerged Wednesday that governors are being denied knowledge of Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, funds routed through State Universal Basic Education, SUBEB, to states.

Minister of State for Education, Ezenwo Nyesom Wike, at a meeting with UBEC in Abuja, told the governing board of UBEC to, henceforth, alert chief executives of the various states whenever UBEC funds and educational materials such as textbooks were released to the respective states.

Wike said:   “I have watched you closely and have identified so many things, and that will be a food for thought for all of us. It is no longer going to be business as usual.

“I spoke with the governors of Bayelsa and Ondo States. I also spoke with the governor of Edo State and it was shocking to know that most of the governors are not aware that the money has come to their states’ SUBEB.

“That means that UBEC is not doing anything to let the state authorities know that they have released such funds to them.  Though the law says that money should be paid to SUBEB directly, nothing stops UBEC from writing to the governors to let them know that such money has been paid to their states.”

Wike advised the commission to,  as a matter of urgency, set up an independent monitoring team, different from that of the commission, with the duty of reporting any issuance of materials to state government authorities in charge of education in order to avoid embarrassing calls form governors.

“It is incumbent on you that you must inform all those bodies who are supposed to know that money has come to their various states, so that tomorrow, you will know you have performed your own function and nobody will hold you responsible.

“Take that as a matter of your principal policy that from henceforth, once you pay money to any state, please do us that favour of letting the authorities know. You can even go further by publishing so that the public will know that this is what has been going on,” he said.

Speaking earlier, UBEC Executive-Secretary, Dr. Ahmed Modibbo, stated that the commission had disbursed marching grants of over N160billion between 2005 and the 3rd quarter of 2011, stating that 29 states had accessed the funds.

He revealed that 29 states had been able to access N30.6billion between August 2010 and September 2011. He added that the situation was so because the commission was encountering serious challenges ranging from slow draw-down of matching grants by states to low level of participation in basic education programme by the organized private sector in the states, and the problems of inadequate relevant field agents and late submission of monitoring reports by staff.

Highlighting the achievements of the commission, he noted, ‘in the last three years, the commission in pursuance of its mandate of co-ordinating the implementation of the Universal Basic Education Programme has recorded a number of achievements.

He said that UBEC had received the sum of N129billionn from the federal government out of which the commission had disbursed N97billion to states for the implementation of the UBE programme whilst N12.1billion had been released to 12,086 communities for self-help projects UBEC, Modibbo also said that the body had distributed 54,805,726 textbooks on mathematics, sciences, English and assorted Library Resource Materials for primary 1 to 6 and for Junior Secondary Schools’

Modibbo also stressed that a sum of the N6.5billion, termed ‘Good Performance Funds’ were given to states which were ascertained to be doing well in the UBE project, as a form of encouragement to the states and also, to endear other states to participate effectively.

He therefore thanked the staff and urged them as promoters of education to take note of the pointers and improve on them to achieve the millennium development goal of 2015.