Dr. Frederick Ikyaan, Benue State Commissioner for Education, speaks with Demola Abimboye and Dapo Olaosebikan on the achievements of Governor Hyacinth Alia. Excerpts:
Newswatch Plus: Education is the key to modern development; can you let us in on Governor Hyacinth Alia’s policies and programmes in this sector?
Dr Ikyaan: From the beginning, Governor (Rev. Fr.) Dr. Hyacinth Alia, came to the state with a very clear direction as to where he wants to go. Fortunately for me, I was part of the team and initiative from the beginning. The critical objective of His Excellency was to bring free education, especially for basic education. As soon as we got on board, we began to look in-to this direction. His Excellency renamed the ministry the Ministry of Education and Knowledge Management, not just the Ministry of Education as we have it all over the country.
Newswatch Plus: What were the initial challenges when you assumed office as commissioner?
Dr Ikyaan: The first challenge we faced was the large scale and massive corruption that had in-fested the system over a long time. I’ll mention just one or two issues. There was no accurate data about the number of schools, teachers and learners we were to deal with. We discovered that the budgets for education over the years had been speculative because they were not based on decisive data. So, the new government decided to undertake an actual school census. Of course the ministry has been doing census over the years but I believe that school principals simply wrote whatever numbers they wanted; the department in charge of data management accepted that, input it into the system and sent it to the authorities as the data for our schools. We have discovered massive fraud in this area. Many principals under-declared the number of their learners so as to beat the system in terms of remittances, taxes and other fees that are stat-utory.
I’ll give you a practical example. Just before Rev. Fr. Alia was sworn in as governor, we went to his village for a funeral. While the funeral service went on, I drew his attention to the school beside the church which he attended. Out of excitement, he requested me to meet with his kinsmen to see what could be done about the school. When eventually the headmaster brought out the documents of the school, it had 26 teachers on the roster but when they were asked to come out, the most shocking thing of the century happened as only one man appeared and the man was the headmaster. He was the sole teacher for all the classes – primary one to six!
This is just one example of the kind of decadence in our school system before this administration came on board.
Newswatch Plus: What did the Ministry do in this regard under your watch?
Dr Ikyaan: With support from Governor Alia, we found a competent consultant who had carried out school census for other states, especially in the north. He is an indigene of the state and he has started the work. And I want to inform you that there has been serious resistance from those that have been perpetrators of the fraud. But, we are equal to the task as we are deeply committed to pursuing this matter until we get to the roots. So this was where we start-ed our work. We believe that the first thing is to establish verifiable data that speaks to the situ-ation before we could get to budget correctly and accurately.
The administration has created three new departments to improve service delivery. These are Digital Resource Centre, Department of Planning, Research and Statistics and Department of Physical Planning and Technical service.
The second point is the issue of infrastructure. Infrastructure development has been a great issue of concern to us. In this way, location of schools has been a major issue and this is han-dled mostly by the State Universal Basic Education Board, SUBEB.
We received a lot of cooperation from the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, in Abuja. With the counterpart funding given by the state, we were able to come to a reasonable sum that enables us to do basic renovation in our schools.
The next thing I will talk about that actually requires very serious attention is the issue of technical education. I have a technical background as I attended a technical school here in the state. Our focus on technical education is to produce school leavers that will be employable and boost the economy of Benue State in the long run.
Luckily, the State Executive Council has approved establishment of more technical colleges in each of the federal constituencies in Benue State. It is our goal to promote technical and profes-sional education and training. In this respect, we have engaged a consultant and he is already making progress. He has given us a report of a few international NGOs which have indicated interest for intervention in our education sector. So I’m confident that in the next one year, all of the ideas garnered will be domesticated in Benue State for acquisition of skills required for modern labour markets and add value to the GDP of the state.
Also, the Rev. Father Hyacinth Alia’s government promotes the idea of smart education. As a result, I was one of few people selected to visit China last year. During that visit, we signed an MOU with a Chinese company called Huawei, a common name and brand in that country, to establish an academy here. Today, that Chinese company has established the Huawei Academy here at the Benue State University, starting with an initial number of 250 learners, cutting across staff and students of tertiary institutions in the state.
Our government is very passionate about the concept of smart schools and we are already building 15 of them.
Recently, we took another memo to EXCO to establish Education Television. There are par-ents who may not be able to afford school fees but their children will still not be disadvantaged as they can sit in their homes and connect to the smart classroom. We have already listed the teachers. They are in the process of starting the training of providing content for this television education. We have acquired a license for the TV project. What remains is the functionality, which is what we are working on. By the time this is done, we will connect with the rest of the world.
Newswatch Plus: What have you been doing to safeguard your schools in the state from in-security?
Dr Ikyaan: There is the concept tagged Safe School Initiative. The Federal Ministry of Educa-tion launched this move in 2023. As soon as the government took off, we started building a rapid response centre. We will have drones, gadgets and equipment to help us do surveillance which identifies attackers from a distance. That surveillance system alerts troops or security personnel within the neighbourhood so that they can respond immediately. The infrastructure development is at about 80 percent completion. After that, we would enter into partnership with some people that have made the contributions, or made a commitment of helping us to equip this centre. For us in Benue, this is a significant thing to do to secure our schools and the neighbouring communities of the Rapid Response Centre’s host community.
The Safe School Initiative is to provide security for all schools whether in the state capital or the rural areas as well as all the communities. When we launched the Safe School operation procedure last year, other national intervention agencies showed interest in it. The launch at-tracted high ranking officers from the Police, Military, Civil Defence, Immigration and the others.
Newswatch Plus: Earlier, you said the new government met decayed infrastructure. How has it addressed this in the past two years?
Dr Ikyaan: We have addressed this through renovating thousands of existing ones and con-struction of more structures. The renovation is under the purview of SUBEB. We have con-structed, renovated and remodelled physical infrastructure especially within the head office of the Board and installed 120KVA Solar Panels for 24-hour power supply at the headquarters for effective service delivery.
In addition, we successfully automated the payroll system and data verification exercise; and trained over 150 Head Teachers on capacity building. There was facilitation of an academic trip of pupils to Indonesia that resulted in a grand trophy for Nigeria, a feat we are all very proud of.
Currently, we are recruiting qualified teachers to resuscitate the hitherto dead primary educa-tion system in the state. We have distributed over 100,000 instructional materials to Primary and Junior Secondary Schools across the State.
Newswatch Plus: In terms of teachers’ welfare, what has the state done in the past two years?
Dr Ikyaan: To be more exact, salaries were a very serious matter in the last administration. However, since the government of Rev. Fr. Hyacinth Alia came, the situation has changed for the better for all the state workers. We have been consistent and steady in payment of teacher’s salaries and implementation of promotion and step increment. Indeed, the governor promised that on the 25th every month, workers must receive their salaries. This he has upheld till date. In some months when the 25th fell on Sundays, workers still received their salaries. For exam-ple, May 25th of this year was a Sunday, I received an alert that very day while I was in the church.
The fact of the matter was that when Governor Alia assumed office, there was this myth he met that it was impossible to pay salaries because if paid, there will not be any funds left for other physical development in the state. But he was surprised that he paid salaries and there was still money for development of the state. Till date, the governor has not borrowed money from anywhere. Now, people are wondering why the state’s workers were owed a backlog of salaries by the immediate past administration to the tune of N350 billion.
We are also aware that teachers need to be trained and this is part of our holistic development of the education system, particularly training in ICT.
Newswatch Plus: Was training restricted to teachers alone?
Dr Ikyaan: The government is training not just the teachers but also all civil servants. The plan was to train 40,000 civil servants in Benue, which includes teachers. The Benue Public Ser-vice Institute has been established by Governor Alia to upgrade the skills and capacity of civil servants in the state. Now we are talking about e-government, e-commerce. This is the new di-rection to go.
The other noteworthy thing is that we have already sent a bill to the State House of Assembly for the upgrading of the Teaching Service Board in charge of secondary schools’ teachers to a Secondary School Education Board, which will be an affiliate of the National Senior Secondary School Education Commission in Abuja which does intervention programmes for state branches nationwide. We expect that when the Assembly resumes from recess, it will pass the bill and the Governor will sign it to become law.
Now, our teachers are abreast of the domestication of the new structure of basic education in Nigeria which is now nine years. Benue is one of the states in the federation that has very quick-ly domesticated this new structure.
It is important to add that the governor has issued a backlog of Basic Education Certificate Exams (BECE) Certificates from 2017- 2023. He has reawakened teachers to their responsibili-ties through daily monitoring and evaluation and implemented migration from manual to e-dossier to monitor students’ progress and movement with proper records remotely. These quality assurance efforts have started yielding fruits as this year 2025 a student of Benue scored 364 in University Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, while many others scored above 300.
Newswatch Plus: What about tertiary education? What value has the new governor added?
Dr Ikyaan: Honestly, it has been two years of unparalleled progress. Benue State University has witnessed expansion of academic programmes and its physical space. More academic pro-grammes have been established in the last 11 months. At least, four new Faculties – Pharmaceu-tical Sciences; Architecture, Mass Communication and Technology and Industrial Studies – have been established.
Above all, Governor Alia has established the Benue State University of Agriculture, Science and Technology, BSUAST, Ihugh, for serious transformation of that sector.
