Edo State Government on Wednesday said it distributed 3.3 million textbooks and writing materials to 848 primary and 306 junior secondary schools in the state in the last five years.
The state chairman of the Universal Basic Education Board ( SUBEB), Mrs Ozavize Salami, disclosed this during the unveiling of 1.5 million books as part of activities to mark the Edo Education Week in Benin.
She stated that out of the 3.3 million, 1.8 million were distributed between 2018 and 2022 to public primary schools in the state since the inception of EdoBEST Programme.
” 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 would go to junior secondary schools,” she said.
According to her, instructional materials are critical to improving education and learning, hence the state government is doing its best to improve the education sector.
Also, Gov. Godwin Obaseki said there had been a lot of backlash of criticisms directed at him and his government on social media in spite of efforts made to move the state forward.
“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 is there so much attacks on him?
” I am sure if you go on most of the 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.
“They are waiting let Obaseki go and they will kill it and 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” Obaseki said.
According to him, with the parents of more than 370,000 children in the school system, with the 20,000 teachers and education managers, the government will go into the streets to let them know that EdoBEST must be sustained
