FG’s N30b on free textbook, wasteful –

The Federal Government has been urged to stop the huge sum of money expended annually on supply of textbooks to students at the basic education level.
A group, Education Rights Initiative (ERI), on Thursday in Abuja, described the supply of textbooks to primary and secondary schools by the Federal Government through the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) as a waste of public fund.
ERI National Coordinator, Dickson Itodo, said in Abuja on Thursday that over N30 billion has been spent by the Federal Government through UBEC on the supply of books to schools in the last three years without any serious impact.
He said: “This waste of public funds should not have happened in the first place or should it have been allowed to go on for so long with over N30 billion down the drain”.
Minister of State for Education, Nyesom Wike, had recently disclosed that since the Federal Government commenced the Free Textbook Initiative in 2010, a total of N52 billion has been expended.
He, however, said this included supply of supplementary library and reading materials to primary and secondary schools.
Wike said a total of 126, 179, 329 textbooks have so far been distributed to schools, saying this has enabled government to achieve 1:1 pupil-textbook ratio as opposed to previous 1:4 ratio.
But Itodo insisted that investigation by the group revealed that some of the textbooks were diverted and never got to some schools as stated by the government.
He said expert findings have revealed that this “huge amount would have been enough to equip most of our schools with science equipment that could serve the schools for several years when compared to the free textbooks whose rate of attrition is so high that less than 5 per cent of it survives after one year”.
He said: “Government should go a step further by instituting a probe on why the UBEC Instructional Material Fund, which is meant for the equipment of public schools with science equipment, was diverted to the supply of free textbooks that parents were already providing for their children”