Uchino Amatey|19 June 2019
The Newly appointed Executive Chairman of State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Dr Stephen Odey has said that his second tenure in SUBEB will be a consolidation on the first to further his rescue mission agenda in the basic education sub-sector.
He made this known upon his resumption of Office after his reappointment.
According to him “during my first tenure, I said I came on a rescue mission, this is rescue mission part two, and this time I am on a speed lane. I want to assure those who are very hardworking that they will retain their offices, having been here for three years I am likely going to make some changes, it is part of my style. If I have accessed you and you don’t have anything to offer I will shift you out, I need few people that will deliver. This is time to redouble our efforts so that when I leave in 2023, I will leave a legacy here.”
Odey who thanked Governor Ayade for giving him another opportunity to serve in the same capacity, pledged his commitment to take basic education to greater heights.
“I must thank His Excellency, Prof. Ben Ayade for finding me worthy again to continue to handle the affairs of SUBEB. I am optimistic that he is still going to give us the fullest support to move basic education to the next level, just like he has done over the years, I promise him and Cross Riverians that I will not disappoint them.”
While speaking on some of the achievements in the basic education sub-sector within his first tenure, Odey said more will be done in infrastructural development as well as capacity building.
“Across the federation Cross River SUBEB is number one, we have intervened more than any other administration, we came in when the previous administration could not accesss 2012-2015 matching grant, but we have been able to access up to 2018. We have done so much in terms of infrastructure development and we will still do more.”
“There are a lot of schools in Cross River State, we cannot attend to all the schools at the same time. However, I can tell you that no administration has done as much as we have done in the past four years. The Ben Ayade led-administration has done so much and we are still poised to do more. As we try to intervene in the urban schools, those who attend the rural schools are also human beings. We have to treat them equally, so they do not feel left out, we do not want discrimination. We are also going to engage in a lot of training and re-training of teachers,” he emphasized.
He further stated that to stop some illegal activities in the Board some changes such as posting of staff needs to be done.
“I came here and I was able to stop people who constantly come here to adjust their retirement dates, people pay so much in connivance with staff to achieve their purpose. There are some people that have so entrenched themselves here, when I was looking at the staff nominal roll recently, I saw people that have spent 24 years here, what are you doing here? You have to also go to other MDAs. So I will definitely do something about that,”he said.