By Ozioruva Aliu

BENIN CITY – THE Commissioner for Education in Edo State, Dr. Paddy Iyamu has said that over 1,000 students migrated from private schools into public schools in the state in the last one year as a result of the rebuilding and renovation of public school by the Governor Monday Okpebholo administration.

In a chat with some journalists in Benin City yesterday about the activities in his ministry, Iyamu said over 68 schools have either been rebuilt or renovated across the three senatorial districts while 25 he said have been recovered from land grabbers.

He said those claiming that no such number of schools have been rebuilt should go to the schools and verify.

“I think if you follow our ministry’s page, you’ll see some of them there that have been displayed. If you are very active online, you will also be seeing them.

“The governor has made it clear that we must give the children of the poor a seat at the table of success and in the last academic session we had over 1000 new students from the private sector, from the private schools enrolling into public schools.

“For instance in Army Day Secondary School, we had about 502 students, in Evbareke, we have about 350, you can go there and verify in Uyiosa they call the school oti ku but today we have over 300 students so only these three schools, if I put them together, it is over 1,000 then when you not talk about the other areas, if we accumulate all the figures together it will be much but so that they don’t say we are giving ambiguous figures, I just try to be moderate in my figures. So it goes to show you the commitment of His Excellency.

It is the new schools that have attracted these numbers. It is the poor state of our schools that give some of these private schools the opportunity to exploit parents.”

Iyamu said 4,000 teachers who were engaged on contract bases for three years by the last administration and another 1,000 engaged by communities have been given full employment in the last one year.

Besides, he said N3 billion out of the N4.6 billion owed workers of the state College of Education which was shut down for restructuring by the last administration have been paid.

“When we did the calculation, it came up to 4.6 billion. I was afraid. I went to the governor, and he said no problem. They work for Edo, we will use Edo money to pay them and immediately approve it.”

On technical education, Iyamu said equipment bought but where distributed to technical colleges have been done and that the state government is also paying N40,000 as stipends to students attending the state’s technical colleges.

He said “All schools are now free in line with the United Nations SDG for free education.Then also free are the technical colleges. We came. It was in the sorry states. You have equipment that people procured. They have been showing on television since 2018. They didn’t install them. What’s not the use? The essence is to make sure that the children of Edo State make use of that equipment. So that when you are building something like tiles, you cannot bring people from Togo bringing people for Cotonu.”