Accord Party candidate for Oyo South Senatorial District, Idris Kola-Daisi has called for more budgetary allocation to education as against current meagre five percent of the country’s budget allocated to the sector.
Kola-Daisi, who stated this while talking to journalists shortly after attending 10th anniversary of an educational service provider, Erudite Millennium Limited, at the University of Ibadan, said everybody in education sector should be happy beyond classroom thereby proposing over 25% of budgetary allocation to education sector.
Lamenting the emigration of trained professionals from Nigeria to other developed countries, Kola-Daisi called on government at all levels to increase job opportunities and create conducive environment for people to thrive.
He appealed to the executive and the current National Assembly to prioritize allocating more resources to education sector in order to improve the standard of education in the country which, according to him, will go a long way to improve people standard of living of the less privileged in the society.
Talking about education in Oyo State, the intending senator decried the position of Oyo State on the WAEC league table, assuring that his party would do the needful if elected into government.
“We know at the moment and the statistics is everywhere , that Oyo State is at the bottom end of WAEC league table. This shouldn’t be so. This the state where we have best of intellectuals in the country. There should be priority in the area of education.
“I’m hopeful that when I’m elected, this is something I’m going to fight for both nationally and locally. I’m hopeful that my party, Accord will take over the governance of the state, these are the kinds of plans we have as a party to make sure that we prioritize education.” He stated.
Talking about ‘Japa Syndrome’, he said: “After allocating such huge amount of money to education, then the question we need to ask ourselves is what are the opportunities that people have when they leave school environment; and the truth is that the opportunity are very limited. Pay is low, there is no job available. So if you are professional and you’ve been educated, your options are very is limited in terms of how you can deploy your skills. So what we can then do is to create those opportunities for people to thrive.
“We need to start looking for ways to attract industries into this country. What are those incentives that we can start giving people so that we can start attracting industrial and economic activities.
“Let’s to also at the vocational side. How we train our youth is important because youth population in Nigeria is growing astronomically. We also need to look into how to fund them and their activities.”
He added that there is no sector in Nigeria that does not need improvement, stressing that a lot of people are emigrating in search of better opportunities which can be provided here. He however stated that government cannot do everything, urging private individuals and well spirited Nigerians to lend a helping hand.