Edo State Government on Wednesday revealed that it has distributed no fewer than 3.3 million books to 848 primary and 306 junior secondary schools in the state.
The state Chairman of Edo State Universal Basic Education Board ( SUBEB), Mrs. Ozavize Salami disclosed this during the unveiling of the books as part of activities to mark the Edo Education Week in Benin.
She stated 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 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 in the state.
Also speaking, Governor Godwin Obaseki said there has 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 environment,” Obaseki said.
“They are waiting to 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.
According to him, with the parents of the 370,000 children in our school system, with the over 20,000 teachers and education managers, we will go into the streets to let them know that EDOBEST must be sustained.
