By Felix Khanoba
The Executive Secretary of Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Dr Hamid Bobboyi, has disclosed that the report of the 2022 National Personnel Audit (NPA) for basic education institutions in the country is almost ready for release.
Bobboyi stated this while fielding questions from newsmen during a one-day colloquium, organised by the Commission in honour of late Professor Gidado Tahir, the former executive secretary of UBEC, on Monday in Abuja.
The colloquium has its theme, “The Nigerian Child: Dynamics of Educational Opportunities.”
The executive secretary said the Commission chose the topic given the role Prof Gidado played as one of the key promoters of basic education in Nigeria.
“The whole idea is trying to see how we can address those issues within the context of the legacies that has been left behind by Gidado.
“UBEC has always involved in this kind of project because we have always believe that you need to engage, discuss and strategize and get involved in research project that can help you understand better those challenges and how best to address to them.
“So it is a continuous process. We have always been engaging in this kind of colloquium, we have outstanding research team and as you know, we also processing the results for the 2022 National Personnel Audit for school census as well as assessment of learning in education, which is one of the largest in Africa that will give us an idea of whether our children are learning or not and areas which we are having difficulties.
“So we are engaging this. We have to do it for the interest of the basic education sector and its development in Nigeria.
“The results of the National Personnel Audit is almost ready. Our hope is to launch both the National Assessment of Learning as well as the personnel audit in July or there about,” he added.
The UBEC boss however, stressed the need for the National Population Commission to conduct census which will help the UBEC in carrying out their functions.
“The only disappointment is on one issue that I needed to raise. You cannot get the number of out of school children from there for the simple fact that you need the population figures of the various age groups from National Population Commission and the National population Commission has not provide this.
“The estimate they have been making are no longer relevant so that is the reason while are very desperate for a national census that can can give us an idea of our accurate population,” Bobboyi said.
The UBEC boss said that the idea of the colloquium was to project the kind of dynamics and challenges within the basic education sub-sector in the area of funding, school attendance and teacher development within the context of the legacies of Tahir.
He said the late Tahir through his giant stride in the sector was able to bring a minimum of five million children back to school.
According to him,Tahir has been one of the key promoter of basic education in the country as he founded the National Commission for Normadic Education (NCEE) and UBEC .
On her part, Director of Basic Education, Federal Ministry of Education, Dr Folake Olatunji-David, said there was need to tap into the potential of the Nigerian child for local and global opportunities.
Olatunji-David said that the dynamics of these opportunities if harnessed would expose the multidimensional goals of the Nigerian child.
”There are dimensional challenges facing the basic education ranging from high level of poverty, high number of Out-of-School Children and others.
”The Nigerian government established the commission to tackle some of these challenges and over the years the commission has been working to address these problems.
”It is therefore the responsibilities of stakeholders to have a proper study and information in order to understand the challenges and opportunities that we still have,” she said.
