Dr Ahmed Modibbo Umar is the Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC). He is saddled with the implementation of the programme across the state through his commission by liaising with State Basic Education Boards (SUBEB). Recently he was at the Lagos State University Faculty of Education conference where he explained the operations of the commission and its efforts in ensuring the smooth operation of the UBE programme. He spoke with Fabian Ozor on the activities of the commission and the distribution of the new UBE curriculum which was released few weeks ago. Excepts.

Well, I suppose as I told you, we are training 40 teachers in every state and we have left the description of selecting the 40 teachers because there are 20 subjects in the new curriculum and for each subject, we are selecting two teachers and we expect them to take congnisant of the fact that there are public and private schools, so in appointing the people they are nominating for the training, they should include some people from pubic schools and private schools, so that there can be a time that private schools can now group themselves into groups until those who have attended the training come back and do the train the trainers thing, till the entire training process is over . We have left the selection of 40 participants in every state for the education board, they are the one who are going to nominate.

Likely from this week from the 10th to the 17th and for South West zone, the training is going to be in two locations, I am not sure University of Ibadan, institute of Education is the one coordinating it. And then we select such persons from polytechnics and universities within the zone. I think they are grouping states, three states and two states, the locations in two locations.

What we do in the first place, if you go to our website, you will discover that we have paid every SUBEB up to June 2008, the allowances of these FTS teachers. They come in, on monthly basis to collect the allowances of participants in their states and what we tell them is since you are supervising these teachers to ensure they have been participating, while you go to pay your teachers for monthly salaries, collect the allowance from us, go and pay them, make a return to us and then collect that of the following month.

In fact, yesterday, as I was leaving the office, they brought cheque for me to sign for July and I told them I wouldn't sign cheque in a hurry so bring them Friday morning when I come back from Lagos and I will sign so hat you send them across to the states. So even July payment due to FTS participants is ready for collection from UBEC headquarters by students. But as I told you some of the SUBEBs have held back these payment and the National Assembly is very annoyed about that level of irresponsibility. You cannot send teachers to the filed and then keep their money after collecting it from UBE headquarters without paying them. In fact, we are sending auditors to go round, to ensure that any SUBEB found to be culpable will be appropriately dealt with in terms of this. But I can assure you that SUBEB have collected up to June 2008. There are few that have not collected and they have not collected because they have failed to account for what they have previously collected and we are taking that up with them seriously.

The production of the curriculum was done using the UBE intervention installation material grant as approved by former Minister Oby Ezekwesili on the recommendation she made to the Federal Executive Council. Since these money was meant to provide installation materials which was specifically meant for state public schools, it was sent to SUBEB for distribution to public primary and junior secondary schools. Private schools are expected to liaise with the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC)who has the copyright and responsibility of producing curriculum for them to purchase it from them, they cannot take it free because it is public fund, they should use their money to purchase the curriculum, from NERDC and make it available for them. And NERDC has been telling them to come forward and pay for this curriculum. .