States should assist children’s education by accessing the funds in their back yard

The revelation that more than N267 billion in released basic education intervention funds remained unspent as of August 2026 should concern all stakeholders in the country, especially at a period when millions of children are not in school. According to the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) Executive Secretary, Dr Aisha Garba, such a huge sum of unutilised funds underscores the need for a fundamental shift in how some states plan, budget and spend money allocated to basic education. What the governors and other stakeholders must understand is that the hundreds of billions of Naira that are trapped within UBEC are not merely unspent funds; they reflect a country whose leaders care little about the future of its children.

For almost two decades, the commission has been reporting unaccessed funds earmarked for universal basic education (UBE)—N50 billion in 2010, N80.9 billion in 2015, and N263 billion as of December 2024. At present about nine states are yet to fully draw down the intervention funds due to failure to provide the counterpart funding. This is also due partly to structural defect: a framework that subordinates the 774 local governments to state executives, reducing a constitutionally recognised third tier to administrative dependency.

In a bid to help the Nigerian child access good education, especially at the foundation level, the federal government established the UBEC in 1999. Its mandate is to administer a fund to all the 36 states of the federation as part of measures to standardise primary education. The UBEC fund is an annual grant by the federal government to help the states upgrade their primary education facilities to provide a good basic education for the nation’s children. To access the fund, state governments are required to match the federal government’s grant strictly for primary education expenditure. While some ignore this facility, children study under very deplorable conditions, including having lessons under trees and dilapidated classrooms while the quality of teachers remain suspect in many cases.

Despite the growing number of out-of-school children across the country, many governors still deny their states of this special federal government intervention fund due to the demand of counterpart funding, which is a needed demonstration of seriousness for entitlement. These states, including Abia, Ogun, and Imo, fail to understand that by not utilising UBEC fund they are fighting a commitment to transparency and accountability to the people whose interests they have sworn to protect. They are also mortgaging the future of our children.

Ordinarily, primary education does not fall within the purview of the federal government and the two per cent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) it set aside for equal distribution to all the states to support basic education was a response to a felt national need. While this intervention fund is not supposed to be the main or alternative fund for that critical education sub-sector, many state governments speak about it with a sense of entitlement. Interestingly, the states complaining of inadequate funds to rebuild classroom, train teachers and provide instructional materials are the ones putting forward all sorts of arguments against rules for access to the special intervention funds.

The states need to have a rethink and show more commitment to primary education by taking steps to access the UBEC fund in the interest of the Nigerian child. Not accessing the fund is not only counter-productive to the education of our children, but also depriving Nigerians of thousands of employment opportunities that could be generated if the huge money lying fallow is injected into the economy through productive activities. We, therefore, urge the governors to reprioritise basic education, which is too important to be neglected. The lesson is all too clear: once the foundation is faulty, whatever we build on it would be permanently defective.