Edo 2024: PDP aspirant pledges to revamp education

The 2024 PDP Governorship Aspirant in Edo, Mr Anslem Ojezua, says his administration will resuscitate award of bursary to students of tertiary institutions, if elected.

Ojezua, who is aspiring on the platform of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), made the pledge on Sunday in Benin while interacting with members of the Correspondents Chapel of Edo NUJ Council.

The resuscitation of bursary disbursement, he said, would be a way of helping parents.

The PDP aspirant also promised to tackle shortage of teachers in the state by reactivating the defunct Teachers Training College (TTC) system to fill the vacuum in the state’s educational system.

Ojezua, an erstwhile commissioner in Edo, said lack of adequate teachers in the state needed to be addressed head-on.

He noted that Gov. Godwin Obaseki’s administration had laid a solid foundation for the educational growth in the state and needed to be sustained.

He regretted that a lot of parents went through difficulties in paying school fees, especially at the tertiary level.

“I enjoyed bursary while in the university and I appreciate the relief bursary brings to students and parents alike.

“If elected, our administration will bring back bursaries and make it a policy to assist students and their parents in footing the bills in tertiary institutions,” he said.

To address the problem of shortage of teachers, he asserted that attention must shift to the issue of TTC, which was abrogated with the introduction of the National Certificate on Education (NCE).

Ojezua noted that the problem with the policy on NCE as against the old TTC, was that the NCE limited the number of subjects a teacher with that qualification could teach.

“A teacher is trained to teach as many subjects as are offered in the class where he or she is the class teacher.

“I am very concerned about education, particularly at the fundamental level, because we have enough schools, but not enough teachers.

“In most cases, it can be traced to the fact that it looks like the state does not have the capacity to pay for the number of teachers that are required, but we will have to look for a way to do it, that is, find a solution.

“How do we get more teachers at a lesser cost? How do we involve our communities, so that our children can have access to good education? Because without education a lot of us will not be sitting here, not you, not me.

“With education, there is nothing we cannot achieve,” he said.

The PDP governorship hopeful also lamented what he termed the “unbelievably high cost of access to health, saying that if that was not addressed adequately, it would spell doom for the majority of the people.

The PDP aspirant also promised to improve on the quality of healthcare service delivery in the state as well as other infrastructure that could make life meaningful to the electorate.