Bamidele: 10th Senate Won’t Compromise Adequate Budgetary Funding to Education

Gbenga Sodeinde in Ado Ekiti

The Senate Majority Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, has assured Nigerians that the 10th Senate will strive hard to facilitate improved budgetary funding for the education sector in the country.

Bamidele said this was necessary in order to reverse the decadence necessitated by poor funding of education in the past years.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) senator, representing Ekiti Central senatorial district, stressed that the measure remains the best way to rescue education from total collapse, and make it functional as a potent weapon to combat poverty.

The federal lawmaker said this in Aramoko Ekiti, Ekiti West Local Government Area of Ekiti State last Monday while distributing 10,000 textbooks to 5,000 students across 50 secondary schools in the local councils in his senatorial district.

Bamidele, represented by his senior legislative aide, Hon. Bunmi Oguntuase, expressed pleasure and concurrence with the statement credited to President Bola Tinubu that proper funding of education remains a top priority of his government.

The lawmaker maintained that Tinubu’s friendly posture to education would complement the position being espoused by Senator Godswill Akpabio-led Senate that the sector must be funded properly to benefit Nigeria.

The Senate Leader lamented the recurrent federal government’s negation of the 26 percent prescribed by UNESCO as budgetary funding to the sector, describing this as the greatest undoing of education in the country.

He said: “Education remains a leveller between the children of the rich and poor in any society. It is the most potent instrument we can use to combat poverty and insecurity. This has been the position of President Tinubu and the current Senate.

“The major focus of the Akpabio-led Senate is to ensure that the sector is properly funded. No country can advance beyond the level of its available human resources, and the only way our human resources can be polished and made productive is through qualitative education.

“So, the current Senate won’t compromise on adequate budgetary funding for education. No nation jokes with education and witnesses economic advancement. It is the major impetus to bolster radical development in any developing economy like ours.

“We are also happy that President Tinubu had demonstrated his love for the sector by signing the Students’ Loan into law. This gave an inkling into how desirous he is to fund education.”

Speaking about the gesture, Bamidele said the free textbooks distribution was meant to propel education in Ekiti State that was widely revered as the Fountain of Knowledge through enhancement of students’ knowledge in English Language and Mathematics.

The senator also commended the state Governor, Biodun Oyebanji, for his commitment to repositioning education in the state via recruitment of adequate manpower to strengthen the sector.