Mr. Godwin Obaseki, the Governor of Edo State, visited the ongoing renovation of the College of Education in Abudu, Orhionmwon Local Government Area of the state, over the weekend, reassuring that the institution will begin academic operations in September 2022.
Obaseki, who toured the Universal Basic Education Commission’s (UBEC) demonstration school and the college’s main campus, said his government is devoted to human capacity development.
He said, “I believe that work is progressing in rebuilding some faculties. We are currently hiring the staff of this school, and are also going to put out an advert for the admission of students for the September session.
“The demonstration school would be like a laboratory for training basic teachers because what we are trying to do is to make these facilities in Abudu another education hub.
“The college will help in training teachers, particularly those to teach basic education. It will not just be another school but fitted with practical laboratories.
“The demonstration facilities you saw there are going to be technologically-driven with a lot of technological aids to train National College of Education (NCE) teachers on the art of modern teaching.”
Obaseki continued: “We want to make sure that we have complete end-to-end requirements for producing world-class teachers for our schools because we cannot compromise on the education regulation which we have started. You can see that the same thing is happening in the school of agriculture, as well as the school of nursing.
“That’s how we want to build our educational system. First, you have to have quality schools, and then quality teachers to now produce the kind of students you need. But in all of these, we have to focus on producing people who can get jobs.
“They are going to commence the landscaping of this facility within the next few weeks. We are currently having a conversation with some energy companies to see how we can power some communities in Edo and see how we can generate and distribute between one to two megawatts of power in some of these cities.”
“We want to decongest Benin City,” the governor added. “I want to see how we can begin to dispatch the population and create activities outside Benin City. Like I have said, we promise to have about 10 to 15 other mini-cities outside of Benin by the time we are leaving office and Abudu is going to be one of them.”