For the Records: GOVERNOR SOLUDO’S HISTORIC EXTEMPORÉ SPEECH AT THE MEETING WITH HEADTEACHERS AND PRINCIPALS OF PUBLIC PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ANAMBRA AT THE PROF. DORA AKUNYILI WOMEN’S DEVELOPMENT CENTRE, AWKA, SEPTEMBER 26TH, 2024

Greetings!

Fellow Teachers!

The last time we met. That was sometime before the end of the last academic session. That was when we distributed laptops to you all, and more, including those who are in the mission schools run by churches because as you are aware, we continued to subsidize those schools by posting thousands of teachers, headteachers and principals.

So, at the beginning of this session, I thought it auspicious to have this interactive session with you because the foundation of every society happens to be the teachers. Here, you have the principals and the headteachers of all public schools.

Welcome to all of you to this very important meeting. It is for us to share some messages and make sure that we are on the same page because the future of Anambra is in your hands.

This meeting is for us to continue the conversation about an agenda to securing the future by breaking what we consider to be the dynasties of poverty, by building the bridge to the future, by giving our children the enablement that they require to be able to survive today, compete in the digital world and overcome.

We also want to advance the conversation as to how, by building human capital, we are not only eliminating poverty, building ladders of opportunities that break the inter-social circles. But also today, if we agree, we will be putting money back in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of parents in Anambra state by what we do. That’s where we are headed to.

Human capital is Anambra’s greatest asset. It is our own “better than oil asset.” And our vision and mission is to create a human capital that is productive at home and exportable abroad- to create a new prosperity by investing in the people; the people themselves becoming the embodiment, the assets that will propel and sustain them in the 21st century.

As you are aware, yes, teachers are gathered here, but this human capital has several dimensions. Our political party, APGA, has as its motto: “leave no one behind,” “be your brother’s and sister’s keeper.” And as true progressives, when we assumed office, we began in earnest. In the area of health, there were health facilities with no doctors and health personnel. We’ve so far recruited over a thousand medical personnel, including consultants and doctors, for our primary health and general hospitals. We are currently rebuilding and refurbished and completely modernized three general hospitals and equipped them. We are building and now completing five new general hospitals for those LGAs and huge urban areas with non at all. Those general hospitals will be commissioned in no distant time.

We’ve also, in 326 wards, we are getting our primary health centres up and running with solar, personnel, and equipment.

Yes! Sometime, late 2022, I launched the free antenatal, free delivery for all pregnant women in Anambra, and even with the free antenatal, they receive free medication and so far, over 60,000 women have benefitted with near zero mortality in all hospitals. Our tertiary health institutions also recieving major boost- our Teaching hospital at Amaku; building a Trauma center that will be world class and so on and so forth in the health sector; quite a huge agenda there, ongoing.

Now, in the area of youth development and empowerment. As you are aware, Anambra is pioneering uniquely Anambra, youth training and empowerment, building our very unique model of apprenticeship system. And so far, 5000 youths have gone through that rigorous training and mentorship, getting two skills of not only a trade but managerial skills. We’ve given them a few billions to empower them, and some of them today are employers of labour. Another 8300 youths are undergoing similar training in Anambra. When they finish, we will also empower them with the resources to take care of their future.

Over 25,000 youths have already received digital training and recently, graduation of about 3000 of them on coding and so on. We are deepening. Our aspiration to have a digital tribe in Anambra is on course. We are building the Innovation District where you have the current government house and all the whole area – about 13 hectares of land is being developed as Anambra’s own silicon valley. The iconic building that will be the main building there is ongoing now, and we hope that by next year, we will be commissioning that as well. That will be the centre of ICT, tech, and so on. Several others in terms of what we are doing to empower people and lift people out of poverty-the vulnerable in terms of this human capital thing.

For example, the palm and coconut revolution and rare seedlings thing that we have distributed over 2 million seedlings to our people. This is designed to permanently lift people out of poverty.

This is an agenda to leave no one behind, but to build to the future. Our focus is to ensure that the woman that sells banana, tomato or onion by the road side, that hawker, wheel barrow pusher; we try the much we can to assist him or her in the present state but more importantly to make sure that his or her children don’t end up like him or her. That is our mission. That is why we are investing heavily in health and, more so, even on education.

When I was growing up as a young man, the children of the poor and the rich attended the same school. Education was the ladder of opportunity that broke the boundaries and provided opportunities for everyone to leapfrog the boundaries of prosperity. But gradually, our education system descended down, and education no longer played that role. We then began to have two sets of citizens- one set of citizens in private/elite schools where they pay handsomely and the children of the poorest of poor were then left behind in public schools with no teachers, infrastructure or facilities.

And so, these children predictably ended up with low learning outcomes. With low learning outcomes, they ended up in the society, poor. And they themselves will also breed children, and their own children will go through the same circle. And so, poverty became a dynasty you can’t escape from. So some of them resort to criminality and so on, to escape the ills of poverty and depravation

We are intentional and deliberate about breaking these dynasties of poverty and once more restore education between those who are in public school and in private school. Our intention is to upscale the public education system to be at par or even better than the private school, so that the children of the poor will have the same opportunity that the children of the middle class and upper class have. That way, you can break that dynasty of poverty.

When we came in, we realized that the norm was schools without teachers. There is no qualitative education without qualitative teachers. When we identified this, within the first nine months, we set up to recruit teachers, not minding the states they came from. Among the first 5000 teachers that we recruited, we have people from 17 other states of Nigeria recruited in Anambra. When we realised more gaps, we recruited an additional 3015 teachers, making it 8115 teachers in our system.

We are embarking on improving our STEM education by refurbishing over 60 laboratories to equip them to get the necessary equipment they require. We’ve broken the jinx with UBEC, with about four years arrears in terms of meeting the counterpart funding for UBEC. We were able to bring in several billions, as well as the federal government, which we’ve pumped in to be able to revamp over a hundred of our primary schools.

For our mission schools, we have a very unique partnership. Since I assumed office, we now have thousands of government teachers deployed and posted to mission schools. More than 3000 new teachers have been posted to mission schools, and we pay them. It costs the government over a billion naira every month in terms of salaries of teachers posted to mission schools. That is to help to subsidize education offered by mission schools. We have standardized the primary and secondary school curricular and lesson notes, and it is expected to improve literacy and learning outcomes. We are also gradually upscaling our schools to smart basis.

For the first time in Anambra, we decided to embark on a truly free nursery, primary up to JSS education in the state, by insisting that no child in this category should be charged any fee. So far today, in our public schools, the last statistics last year showed an upsurge in school enrolment of 18.7 per cent. The consequence is that the percentage of children out of school dropped to all time low of about 2 per cent, making Anambra the number one in the country with the lowest percentage of children out of school.

Today, we are facing binding resource constraints. The minimum wage law has just been passed. I am confident that by next month October, we will start paying the minimum wage in Anambra state.

My fellow teachers, You employed us to do this job. We are working very hard for you and your children and those yet unborn. If God in his infite wisdom decided that we will be ndị Anambra, we have a duty to make it prosperous and leave no one behind. It is tough. As you are aware, we came at very turbulent times in terms of our finances. Pensioners- local government, primary school pensioners who retired from 2018 to 2022 before I came, they were not paid their gratuity arrears. That amounted to about 14.6 billion naira. At the state civil service own and those in secondary school who retired, their gratuity arrears amounted to 7.6 billion. Those who retired from the state, secondary schools, and so on, we are about to clear the backlog of arrears.

For the local governments, they’ve gone through 2019 and gradually come up as well. But we have ensured that whoever retires, once their documentation is done, their gratuity is paid, and then we start paying their pensions. Yes! I’m now 2 years and six months in office, and we have deliberately refused to borrow, even though I got approval to borrow. Borrowing is not a bad thing in itself, provided you put it in something that will enable you to pay back. We don’t want to encumber the future. I’m not going to take money for consumption. I’ll borrow to build capacity for the future. We’ll have a loan to build enablers to give our people the capacity that will take them to the future. We are propelling projects and programmes that will qualify for that.

We are going to maintain fiscal sustainability in Anambra under my watch. We now rank among the top states in terms of fiscal sustainability and viability.

But today, in spite of those difficulties, the future of our children will remain number one. We will sacrifice everything to achieve it. I have to share with you our decision and a new policy. Yes! We have truly free basic education, and enrolment has surged almost 29 per cent in public schools. We want to say to our people that once you are in Anambra, in all government/public schools, we should be able to guarantee every child from nursery, through primary, through JSS 1 to 3 and from today going forward, through SS 3, in all the public schools in Anambra, it will be completely free.

For our primary schools, your running costs will be more than double. Our secondary schools, you’ll be far better than where you are today. I’ll give you the framework for the governance soon.

I know some of you have started collecting fees for the SS 1 to 3. By next week, you are going to refund this money back to all the parents. All these hundreds of thousands of families that have paid their fees, the money will go back to their pockets. We are going to provide this so that our children, with the qualitative new teachers that we have recruited into our schools, the investments that we are making and continue to make in terms of upgrading and upscaling their infrastructure and facilities, the continuous learning, a new legal framework for monitoring, evaluation and quality assurance in our schools and yes, now, ensuring that our children in public schools- that we can guarantee their futur by making education qualitative and accessible for the poorest of the poor.

With the mission schools, we still have our thousands of teachers in them, and we will continue to pay the billions to cover their salaries. That’s the way we help subsidize. If the government doesn’t pay, their fees will skyrocket.

We are also working very hard with various communities. We were shocked to discover 77 communities in Anambra, with no presence of public schools for decades. We are now working with the communities because the children in those communities must have options- decide which school they want to attend. Some of those communities are providing land, some offering to build, and we are developing the prototypes under our Public-Private-Community-Partnership arrangement.

Securing our future is a collective effort, and we must seize it now. That’s the greatest investment that we can make. Education is the key to unlocking the future, and today, we are taking one other bigger step among several other steps ahead of us. We are systematic, methodical, and very intentional. Anambra will continue to be the sure leader. This, under our watch, is our commitment to ndị Anambra. We will continue to take whatever steps it takes to ensure that we continue to be the sure leader in that sector.

Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Extracted by Christian Aburime