From Olanrewaju Lawal, Birnin Kebbi
The Kebbi State Government has announced that it will spend N4.5 billion on the construction of primary and junior secondary schools in the 21 local government areas of the state.
The Chairman of the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Professor Sulaiman Khalid, stated this during a two-day stakeholders workshop organised by SUBEB in Birnin Kebbi designed for SUBEB technical staff, LGA’s senior project officers, 21 director planning, research and statistics and 21 education secretaries.
According to him, ‘the state government is going to spend over N4.5 billion to construct primary and junior secondary schools in order to improve the atmosphere of learning environment, the scheme and skills of all teachers.
‘Virtually every teacher will be affected by the training and retraining on the state of the act of teaching method in our primary and junior secondary schools.’
Khalid explained that the purpose of the workshop was basically to intimate the officials involved in direct monitoring and supervision of the major contracts to know their obligation and to discharge same accordingly.
‘The contractors have already finished the procurement process and are about to mobilise to the site. They should know that the state government must have value for the money, and we will not condone any shoddy contract,’ he said.
‘We are going to mobilise our lawyers to ensure that whoever fails to execute the contract according to the bill of quantity, definitely they will not be paid.’
Earlier, the Head of SUBEB Physical Planning Unit, Alhaji Muhammad Bala, said that the workshop would be concerned with the basic requirements needed by both UBEC and SUBEB towards achieving standard projects implementation for the year 2019 and 2020 intervention projects.
‘I wish to express our profound gratitude to Governor Abubakar Atiku Bagudu for constituting a board headed by a Professor with proven integrity that has made the SUBEB within the shortest period of time a conducive atmosphere to work.
‘This is also in addition to appointing part-time LGEA chairmen from different universities of the federation to fine-tune the basic education of a Kebbi child, which has never happened in the history of our dear state.
‘However, Kebbi State has been rated as one of the states having a smooth partnership with UBEC with over N17 billion injected in basic education in recent years that paved way for construction and renovation of more than 3,000 schools, provision of over 150, 000 furniture, pipe-borne water and numerous schools equipped with ICT centres with no single goes or abandoned projects in the state,’ the head of the unit said.