EDUCATION ‘Benue will improve UBEC spends N100m on TETFund condemns poor school enrolment’ teacher training per state use of funds by higher institutions

to intervene in August through the organized labour, which was also handling the state verification then,” he explained.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had to reach out to stakeholders within the state including the late former governor, Engineer Abdulkadir Kure, who waded in to prevent what many believed would have been a major industrial crisis.

The NLC had to take over the screening exercise at the council after asking the governor to set aside two months salaries to douse tension already heightened by the four months backlog. “Labour was able to pay for the month of September before they commenced screening in October. But then there was still backlog from March,” the NUT chairman noted.

However, when it became obvious that teachers would not still return to the classroom despite the effort, the governor directed the Ministry of Local Government to source for fund and offset the arrears for July, August and November.

“The money has coming in batches”, chairman explained.

Worried by the development, the state government had to intervene by releasing some monies as bailout to affected councils to augment what accrued to them as allocation. At the post-exco briefing last week, the state government said it had so far released the sum of N4.5 billion in batches as bailout to the 12 local government areas for salaries.

As the crisis lingers, many have queried the rationale behind moving the payment of teachers’ salaries from the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) which was statutorily mandated to handle such matter to the Ministry Of Local Government, Community Development and Chieftaincy Affairs in the first place.

Comrade Umar is also of the opinion that the government policy of transferring the payment was partly responsible for the crisis.

The issue of ghost schools was also a subject of debate by the NUT and chairmen. While the verification committee was said to have uncovered 22 nonexisting primary schools, with 24 faceless heads on the payroll for the past six years, the NUT said such claim could not have been true. being the