Honorable Kehinde Bamigbetan is the chairman of Ejigbo Local Council Development Area, a community adjudged the most populous in Lagos state. Almost three years since assumption in office, the soft spoken journalist-cum- politician told Albert Akpor that his administration place high premium on quality education by providing the necessary aids to learning; which he says, is organic to nation building.

Question: Almost three years on, what can you say is the land mark achievement of this administration?

Kehinde Bamigbetan

To the glory of God our administration has been able to leave an indelible mark in the minds of the teaming residents of Ejigbo LCDA. I want to say here with all sense of modesty that precisely on assumption of office on October 2008, I introduced free uniforms and meals for pupils in my locality.

As I talk to you now, nearly all the 57 local governments in the state have keyed into the idea, but we were the first to introduce the novel idea. And the wife of the former governor, senator Oluremi Tinubu was on hand that day to launch the exercise.

The rationale behind that noble idea is that I discovered that most of our primary school pupils attend classes in tattered uniforms and this to the best of my knowledge will not give the pupils the right mindset to be able to concentrate on their studies in classes.

And we believe that if we can provide free uniforms for them, make the classes look good, feed them as little as we could, that would go a long way to enabling them concentrate on their studies; and we have been able to achieve just that.

And I must tell you one positive thing that happened since we introduced this exercise; the population of the nine schools in the locality was about 4000 plus, but after the introduction of the free uniforms, the population increased tremendously to about 6000 and to the glory of God, as I talk to you now, the population of pupils in our schools is over 7000; this is as a result of the incentives put in place.

Another rationale behind the introduction of the free meals at least once in a week in our schools is to reduce the yawning disparity between the private and public schools in the locality, because some years back, you can bear me witness that most public schools were not in good shape, even before the advent of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

But with the efforts of the former governor complemented by the administration in the state, you can see that the atmosphere in both primary and secondary schools in the state is much more better now.

Teachers are well motivated, the pupils and students are provided with free basic educational materials and we are replicating that in our LCDA. Not only the provision of free uniforms and meals, just recently we provided rulers note books pencils and chalk to the pupils and teachers alike.; these are the areas we have been trying on the aspect of quality education. The records are there for you to verify.

Again, we did not stop at the primary school level, we targeted the secondary school students too, by providing free GCE and JAMB for them. As I talk to you, we have been able to provide free GCE and JAMB forms to over 1,000 beneficiaries in the LCAD and this we have been doing since 2009.

The records are also there for anybody to verify. We have even done that of 2011 because it is a yearly exercise. So these are some of the areas we have been able to touch the lives of residents in the area of education.

And lest I forget, we also introduced internship pro gramme for undergraduates in our locality. We discovered that most of our undergraduates come from poor family background with some self-sponsored because their parents could not pay their fees.

So we introduced the internship pro gramme by way of giving temporary employment in the local government where they would work because as undergraduates, they are potential specialists in various fields.

For instance, if you are studying engineering in the university, what we do is that we will enroll you in our engineering department so that you can apply the little experience you have gathered in school with the one our professionals will impart in you, then you will be able to improve in your studies. At the same time, we pay stipend of N10, 000 at the end of every month.