Aisha Garba, an education specialist with the World Bank, was on December 17 announced as the new Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC).
UBEC is an intervention, coordinating and monitoring agency charged with improving the capacity of states, local government and communities to provide unfettered access to high qualitative basic education in Nigeria.
It does this by providing grants to states. The grants are accessed after the states have paid their own counterpart fund, which is fifty percent of the grant.
UBEC used to pay N1.3 billion to each state as grant while the states are expected to provide a matching fund of the same amount to access the grant.
But the grant has now been increased to N3.5 billion in view of the current inflationary trend.
The matching fund to be paid by the state is meant to provide infrastructural facilities for both students of primary and junior secondary schools, including classrooms, laboratories, toilets and water, among others.
President Bola Tinubu, according to a statement by Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser (Information & Strategy) “expects the new Executive Secretary of UBEC to drive the renewed hope and vision of providing and supporting quality education and ensuring that Nigerian children become globally competitive.”
But the mandate of UBEC to ensure provision of quality basic education in the country is dependent on the states providing their matching grants and utilising the total funds on basic education development. But this has not been the case.
States Don’t Provide Matching Grants
A document uploaded to UBEC website on April 2nd shows that 27 states and the Federal Capital Territory failed to access N59.9bn UBEC funds in the last three years because they failed to appropriate funds for it.
Only Jigawa, Sokoto and Zamfara states in the North-West; Borno and Taraba states in the North-East; Nasarawa State in the North Central; Ondo State in the South-West; Enugu State in the South-East and Delta State in the South-South have fully accessed their funds.
Many states, including those with the highest number of out-of-school children such as Kebbi, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe and Katsina states have failed to access the grants.
Some states that accessed the grant were found to have misappropriated the funds. Example is the case of a former governor of Kwara State, Abdulfatah Ahmed, who is currently facing trial for allegedly diverting over N5.78 billion UBEC fund.
Abubakar Hassan, a staff of UBEC, while testifying before a Kwara State High Court sitting in Ilorin, the state capital, said the fraud was discovered during project monitoring exercise. “We discovered that the monies meant for the project (2013) had been diverted by the Kwara SUBEB,” he alleged.
The case was adjourned further hearing to February 17, 2025.
The Education Advisor of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, Dr Ebenezer Leo The Great, in a recent interview disclosed that many state governments find it difficult to raise the 50 per cent counterpart funding, saying it’s considered too high and suggested a new legislation to bring it down.
Human rights lawyer, Mrs Funmi Falana (SAN), in February this year dragged the 36 state governments and the FCT before the Federal High Court in Lagos, over their failure to access N68bn UBEC funds to provide free basic education for their citizens.
Falana said the states failed to pay the counterparts funds necessary to access the UBEC funds, and joined the Attorney-General of the Federation, the Minister of Education and UBEC as defendants in the suit.
Out- Of- School- Children Still On The Rise
According to UNICEF which supports children to attend school in Nigeria where primary education is officially free, about 10.5 million children aged 5-14 years are not in school, and only 61 percent of 6–11-year-olds regularly attend primary school while only 35.6 percent of children aged 36-59 months receive early childhood education.
A CableIndex report recently published ranked Kebbi state as the state with the highest number of out-of-school children at 67.6%. Others are Sokoto: 66.4%; Yobe: 62.9%; Zamfara: 61.3%; Bauchi: 55.7% and Borno: 54.2%.
The states with the lowest is Anambra State at 2.9%, followed by Imo at 5.1% and Ekiti at 5.1%.
The new UBEC boss brings more than twenty-four years of experience driving impactful programs in education for human and economic development, working in Nigeria, Ghana, Somalia, Kenya, the USA, and the United Kingdom.
There is high expectation that she can meets the President’s expectations for basic education. According to Amina Umar, an educationist, told NewsNGR that Aisha Garba is the right person for the job.
“She is certainly qualified for the job since she handled bigger budgets at the World Bank and was heading the bank’s AGILE project in Nigeria,” she said, adding however that she must beware of the state governors and “come up with ways of doing things to deliver, including changing the enabling laws if necessary.”