The Cross River Centre for Excellence, CRICE, has lauded Sen. (Dr.) Stephen Odey for his “unprecedented achievement” when he served as chairman of the State SUBEB.
Odey is the Commissioner for Education in the state.
Speaking in Calabar on Thursday, coordinator of the CRICE, Solomon Oqua, said the records of the former chairman of the agency was in the public space and remains a reference point for others.
“For the records, the former board, remains the first in the history of CR-SUBEB to introduce Commissioning of executed projects, the first to monitor projects with board members as led by the then Executive Chairman, first board to introduce plastic tables and chairs for learners and over 30,000 plastic tables and chairs supplied across schools in the state.
“Prior to 2015, all these were never done; no single record of a collapsed building has been recorded till date, which further proves that quality jobs were executed across the State schools,” Oqua stated.
He further stated that attempts to tarnish the record of Senator Odey was nothing new, but has always amounted to nothing.
He stressed that, “all the projects executed by CR-SUBEB under the stewardship of Senator Odey, were monitored regularly by the Cross River State Universal Basic Education Board Physical Planning Department, Project Monitoring Team from UBEC visits all the States quarterly, Financial Monitoring Team from ICPC, and Consultants Engineers across the nation under the aegis of The Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) a statutory body set up by the Federal Government of Nigeria with the mandate to regulate the practice of Engineering in all aspects and ramifications, all these are to ensure that best practices are maintained.
“The last leadership executed 639 projects between 2015 and 2023 and completed them. These projects were all commissioned and handed over for use, first of its kind in the history of the state.”
An online newspaper, The Investigator, had alleged poor contract execution in some of the SUBEB projects under Odey as chairman.
