The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on Tuesday indicated its readiness to partner with the Universal Basic Education Commission to engage school children across the country in its crusade against corrupt practices.
Chairman of the EFCC, Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde, while receiving the UBEC representative at the corporate headquarters of the EFCC in Abuja, said the initiative involved supporting selected schools with the sum of N1 million each to execute self-help projects that would impact considerably in their various environments.
Lamorde said: “The youth are a veritable ally in the anti-corruption crusade and must be taken along right from their early stages.
“Thus, we have taken steps to involve them in the fight through various programmes that have been initiated by the commission, one of which is the establishment of integrity groups across schools.”
While congratulating the benefitting schools, Lamorde added that the primary role of these clubs was to build future leaders with integrity, honesty, patriotism and high moral values as a basis for social change in Nigeria.
Representative of UBEC and Director, Social Mobilisation in the commission, Ibrahim Sulaiman, informed the EFCC that the self-help project is a World Bank-funded initiative that began in 2002 and which has so far intervened in over 20,000 schools across the federation by empowering them directly with the sum to execute projects having direct bearing on the lives of their students.
The Director further said that the N1 million given to the schools was catalytic in nature and will ginger the communities where these schools are cited to own the projects, because only schools with broad-based management committees that involve the community benefit from the scheme.
In his remarks, the commission’s Secretary, Mr. Emmanuel Akomaye, re-echoed the significance of the event to underscore the importance of children in the totality of any country’s national life.
The eleven schools that have benefitted so far from the N1 Million scheme are: Model Highway School, Calabar; Edo College, Benin City; Oyemekun Grammar School, Akure; Community Secondary School, Wadata, Benue State; Government Secondary School Akwanga, Nassarawa State; Government Junior Secondary School Kurmin Mashi, Kaduna State; Government Girls Secondary School, Wammako, Sokoto; Model Secondary School, Donga, Taraba State; Government Technical College, Abakaliki; Queen’s School 1, Enugu; and Mashafa Community School, Abuja.