By Wole Adedeji, Ilorin
Concerned stakeholders have insisted that the immediate past governor of Kwara State, Abdulfatah Ahmed and the immediate past management of the State Universal Education Board, SUBEB, be made to account for the Board’s N1 billion.
Different callers on a radio programne, ‘Newspaper Review,’ on Albar’ka FM in Ilorin, monitored by this reporter said that the state government’s disclosure that N1 billion that could not be accounted for under the watch of the former governor should not be swept under the carpet.
Chief pRess Secretary to the Kwara State Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, Rafiu Ajakaiye, had earlier in a statement said that because the money, which was a fund from the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, could not be accounted for, and as a result of this, Kwara State could not access its rightful funds from the Commission for years under the watch of the former governor.
The radio station had in its phone-in programme asked listners to call and express their views on the missing money and make recommendations.
Majority of the callers opined that the acts of those who might have caused the fund’s mismanagement had simply made children of the poor masses to be denied their rights to education.
They further lamented that the state had by the acts of improprieties lost billions of naira meant for the development of the primary education sector, thereby denying Kwara State’s primary education sector the benefits that other states had enjoyed for several years.
Ajakaiye in the statement on behalf of his boss had said that AbdulRazaq described “top officials of the government he succeeded as the people who stole the future of Kwara children.”
Aakaiye quoted Governor AbdulRazaq as saying that the “criminal diversion of funds meant for development of basic education amounted to reckless looting of the future of Kwara children.”
The governor’s spokesman said that his principal, at the official signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, for the ‘KwaraLEARN Programme, described as laughable to hear “characters who took part in the looting of public resources for basic education to talk about good governance or launching themselves back to public offices in 2023.”
Ajakaiye said the governor also disclosed that his administration spent the last two years on heavily funding basic education to take Kwara back to national reckoning, “seven years after the state was blacklisted for the looting of the UBEC funds in 2013 by the former administration.”
Ajakaiye said, “AbdulRazaq said that the introduction of KwaraLEARN came after the administration had stabilised the system. The programme will give the Kwara child access to 21st century digital education in a sustainable way.
“The former administration misbehaved. They did not invest in education at all. It is indeed saddened to know that they did what they did. We all know what UBEC stands for.
“It was created by the Federal Government to assist states with funding of basic education system. In 2013, the state was given about a billion naira and they just stole the money. Since then the state was barred from accessing the funds.
“The state was blacklisted until 2019 when UBEC started forcing them to pay back. When we came in 2019, there was an outstanding of N450 million to be paid. So, we quickly paid that.
“The sad tale is that there had been no significant investment in education. The school infrastructure had collapsed. Teachers were not paid. Teachers were promoted, but they did not back it up.
“We are just backing it now, some dating back to 2017. Teachers were paid half salaries. Teachers were working as bricklayers to supplement their incomes because they didn’t get their salaries.
“We have come a long way. We are trying to build confidence in our teachers through training and retraining. Nobody was training the teachers, talk less of payment of salaries. So, there was a total collapse of the education system.”
