About 50 inmates of the Internally Displaced Persons camp at the International Christian Centre for Missions, Ohogua in the Ovia North-East Local Government Area of Edo State have secured admission to tertiary institutions across the country within a period of one year.
The Director of the ICCM centre, Pastor Solomon Folorunsho, who disclosed this in an interview with our correspondent in Benin, said 260 of the IDPs had also been registered for various external examinations for the 2018 academic session.
He said, “We have been able to achieve much since they came to this camp in 2013 (six years ago) and you’ll recall that most of them could not speak English when they arrived here, but today, the reverse is the case. Their determination and eagerness to learn is what is motivating us to provide them whatever it takes for them to advance.
“They so much believe in their country, Nigeria, while believing that the ugly incident that befell them created an opportunity for them to find themselves in a place where they can probably get what they wouldn’t have achieved over there.”
According to Folorunsho, the IDPs are grabbing every opportunity with both hands as they are eager to get to the top of all that is good in the camps for the advantage and benefits of their people back home.
“As I speak with you, over 40 of them are studying various courses such as Communication Engineering, Biochemistry, Nursing, Environmental Sciences, Business Administration in the higher institutions like the University of Maiduguri, Edo State University, University of Benin, among others. There are three of them, who wanted to study Medicine, but were given alternative courses to study,” he said.
He added that, though “they accepted the alternative courses offered to them, they are determined to study medicine somehow.”
The director of the ICCM/IDPs camp also spoke on some of the problems facing the centre, including funding of the education of the inmates, which he put at an average cost of N6 million to get them registered for external examinations such as WAEC, NECO and UTME on an annual basis. He said aside from the 250 of them registered to write NECO and WAEC in 2018, no fewer than 70 of them were also registered for this year’s UTME.
“We pay teachers and other staff salaries and wages and we have qualified teachers, while 95 per cent of them are being paid by us. We need funds to pay them, as much as we are very grateful to the Edo State Government for donating eight high standard blocks of classrooms that we use as secondary school, well equipped with good furniture, which has helped us in a long way,” Folorunsho added.
He said the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Yakubu Dogara, had been very supportive of the educational career of the inmates.
