It was the 60th birthday of Oloriewe Raheem Adedoyin, global board member and Nigeria Secretary of the International Press Institute (IPI) and his friends in the media converged on Ilorin, the Kwara State capital to celebrate a dogged and committed fighter for press freedom.
On the eve of the celebration, the state governor, Mallam AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq took advantage of the opportunity of having the members of the fourth estate of the realm in his domain to share insight on governance.
Of all the things the governor said that evening, what stood out for me is what I choose to call ‘executive scam in government houses’.
The governor, who expressed his passion for education, said upon assumption of office a little over two years ago, his first point of call was the basic education sector which he hoped to turn around in line with his administration’s blueprint.
This was, however, not to be following a discovery he made.
He found out that Kwara state had been blacklisted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) for six years.
UBEC supports states to fund basic education in the country through a matching grant system where states have to match whatever funds the commission makes available to them as grant.
Over the years, states have either had a challenge raising the counterpart fund or have not prioritised basic education enough to commit the needed funds.
In April this year, UBEC said that about N41.06 billion matching grant had remained not been accessed by the 36 states and Federal Capital Territory. Executive Secretary of UBEC, Dr Hamid Bobboyi said out of N184.8 billion set aside by the commission, N143 billion matching grant was accessed by states between 2017 and 2020.
While no state has accessed the 2020 grant, Ogun State has yet to access its 2018 allocation while Niger, Ogun, Enugu, Anambra, Ebonyi, Imo and Edo are yet to provide matching grants for 2019.
So in Kwara State, the government decided to play a fast one on UBEC.
According to the governor, in 2013, there was a N1 billion grant to be accessed by the state from UBEC and the previous administration took a loan from a commercial bank to show proof to the commission that it had fulfilled the condition for accessing the grant. Convinced that the state had its counterpart fund ready, UBEC paid the N1 billion grant to the states account.
This is where it gets interesting!
The state government now in receipt of the N1 billion from UBEC, quickly returned the money borrowed from the bank and proceeded to appropriate UBEC’s N1 billion for purposes other than that which it was meant for.
UBEC would later find out through its monitoring mechanism and that was how the state was blacklisted and ordered to return the N1 billion to UBEC’s account.
At the time the AbdulRazaq administration took over, about N600 million out of N1 billion had been paid. The new government, rather than settle and begin to implement its own blueprint for the sector, had to start with offsetting the about N400 million outstanding and then work on reestablishing a relationship with the commission and raising funds to access outstanding grants.
That was not all. The governor said there was also an outstanding bill of over N30 million for various examination infractions involving 165 public and private schools in the state, due to the West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) which has administration also had to offset.
AbdulRazaq said infrastructure deficit, dilapidated classrooms, lack of furniture and instructional materials were the order of the day in the state’s public schools and there was no way any responsible administration will begin by building new schools just because that was what it had in its blueprint, rather than fixing the existing but dilapidated ones.
So if you have often wondered why governments usually fail at implementing the manifestoes on which they were elected, wonder no more.
Governor AbdulRazaq said while a lot of money is spent on recruiting professionals who come up with theories of how a government should be run and the projects it will implement, the reason the blueprints are hardly ever followed through is that the elected officials more often than not, have to go back to fix what isn’t there and before they’re done, it’s time to go.
As I listened to the governor, one nagging question on my mind was why governments find it difficult to implement new projects alongside rehabilitating old ones and why some do nothing all together, as is the case in some states.
Then I remembered the usual excuse – paucity of funds.
After all, the finance minister has told us that the country’s economy is in a fragile state.
The way I see it, what happened in Kwara in 2013 will happen again if calls by Ekiti State governor, Kayode Fayemi that the counterpart funding condition for accessing the UBEC grant should be removed. States will simply collect and squander the money while public basic education remains in a shambles.
The condition should be upheld while UBEC strengthens monitoring mechanisms to fish out culprits as they did in Kwara.
