Delta State government has inaugurated a six-man planning committee to organise an education summit in the state in 2016.
Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa, who inaugurated the committee, said the summit was his administration’s determination to use education as a tool for economic transformation in the state.
According to Okowa, human resources accounts for 65 percent of a nation’s socio-economic development, as a good educational system has the capacity to produce and transformed individuals in the sense that they are equipped with the knowledge and skills to develop the society they live in and make a success of their careers and lives.
Organising an education summit has become necessary to check the falling standards and noticeable deficiencies in our present education system in the state and the country in general, he said.
He said the summit with the theme, “Leap Frogging Education in Delta State,” would hold in the first quarter of 2016.
The governor named Patrick Muoboghare, former commissioner in the state, as chairman; Vincent Magboma, secretary; Chiedu Ebie, Jude Sinebe, Pat Ejeteh, Mary Edema, and Jackson Ekwugum are members, respectively.
He charged them to consider “learning goals, value orientation, social transformation, community participation, learning climate, service learning and centre of excellence as their terms of reference as well as chose resource persons for the summit.”
Okowa posited that “today’s knowledge economy, education, not oil or natural resources has become the competitive edge of serious countries all over the world; the meteoric rise of countries like Singapore, Malaysia, China and South Korea that have leapfrogged other third-world nations and joined the elite league of developed nations is due largely to the development of their human capital.”
IDRIS UMAR MOMOH
