Obaseki orders arrest of teachers over examination malpractices

Some teachers in one of the privately owned primary schools in Edo State have been arrested for allegedly attempting to manipulate the conduct of the Primary School Leaving Certificate examination held across the state on Monday.

They were arrested on the orders of Governor Godwin Obaseki who paid an unscheduled visit to some schools where the examination held.
Obaseki was at the schools to ascertain the level of sanity and orderliness during public examinations.

The governor also expressed displeasure over activities he noticed at Ologbosere Primary School in Ikpoba Okha Local Government Area where an official and a private school teacher accompanied their pupils to sit for the primary six examinations.

Our dream is for Yabatech to in equipment fabrication- TETfund boss

Esther Taiwo
Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust fund, TETfund, Dr. Abdullahi Bichi Baffa, has disclosed that the plan of TETfund is to see Yaba College of Technology leading the way in equipment fabrication.

He said this recently while commissioning the college Central Research Laboratory, Technology Building and Science Building, maintaining that one of the key mandates of the agency is supporting the institution’s essential infrastructure for teaching and learning.

“We will not rest until all our tertiary institutions have the required number, capacity and quantity, in terms of the essential infrastructure. You will also agree with me that in almost all the tertiary institutions in our country, you will think that it is a TETfund campus because a minimum of 60 percent of the structures you will see are done by TETfund,” he said.

Dr. Baffa commended Yabatech and remarked that TETfund has supported them with facilities and equipment that are needed to make the Central laboratory, a world class.
His words: “Providing this equipment will help the Polytechnic train students in practical skill to be able to compete and function globally in their profession. We are happy that they have used the fund judiciously”.

Dr. Baffa said TETfund will continue to support beneficiary institutions to deliver on quality physical infrastructure for teaching and learning, noting that this is only one intervention line out of about 12 that the agency supports institutions with.

“For a very important college of technology like Yabatech, we want to see Yabatech leading the way in equipment fabrication.

And we will want to see some of the tools and equipment we are spending millions to bring into the country being fabricated here on our campuses because we have the manpower, we have the students that are willing to learn and we also have the scholars that have the skills and are willing to do, and there is some money meant for that. When such design of equipment is fabricated, Yabatech can sell them to a patent, entrepreneur or industrialist for mass production of such an equipment or tool.

The other intervention is the institution based research, we are giving up to N2 million to support the conduct of research by scholars. We have also said that since our intervention is literary performance index disbursement, the same with our research intervention, we want it to be performance index based,” he said.

In her remarks, the Rector Yabatech, Dr. Margaret Kudirat Ladipo, stated that the institution places very high premium on human capital development, noting that during the last year intervention, the polytechnic was allocated N200 milion to support training of scholars to do masters and PhD. from all over the world as against the N70 million that was allocated in 2015.

“We want our scholars to go to the best universities in the world to get the best of training and so as to provide the best of training to our students.

Conference attendance is also a golden opportunity by the fund for scholars and staff to go and develop their research findings and discuss their work with their foreign professional colleague all over the world. We are happy for the execution of the projects as we are trying to bring the industry to the classroom because we want our students to key into the development to make them employable”, the Rector enthused.

Augustine Okezie
Abuja