The Edo Government on Wednesday announced that it had distributed 3.3 million books to 848 primary and 306 junior secondary schools in the state.
Announcing the distribution during the unveiling of the books as part of the activities to mark the Edo Education Week in Benin City, the Chairman of Edo State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Mrs Ozavize Salami, said that out of the 3.3 million, 1.8 were distributed between 2018 and 2022 to public primary schools in the state.
“Today, you are surrounded by 1.5 million books which would be distributed to schools across the state. One million of these books will go to primary schools while over 500,000 will go to junior secondary schools,” she said.
Salami stressed that instructional materials were critical to improving education and learning, hence the state government was doing its best to improve the education sector in the state.
In his remarks at the occasion, Governor Godwin Obaseki said there had been a lot of backlash of criticisms directed at him and his government on social media despite efforts made by him to make things work in the state.
“Often time you go online and you see the attacks on me and my government, you will ask, if the government is doing all these things, why are there so many attacks on him?
“I am sure if you go on most of the blogs, the critical blogs, you will not see any stories about the improvements we have made in our schools, about how we have transformed our school system into learning systems. You will not see,” Obaseki said.
Obaseki added that his critics were waiting for him to go so that they would kill the initiative, as they kept asking “Why is he wasting all this money to buy books for the children? Na books we go chop?
“They are not interested in the future but the experience of the last one or two years has taught us that they will not succeed. They can’t because we can see the political evolution in our country,” he assured.
According to him, With the parents of the 370,000 children in the state’s school system, with the over 20,000 teachers and education managers, the governor maintained that “we will go into the streets to let them know that EDOBEST must be sustained.”
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