Many stakeholders blame the development on government's reduction of avenues for teacher training, saying apart from scrapping the old teacher-training colleges, the colleges of education that train primary to middle level teachers are almost extinct. As a way of resolving this, they
said these lapses must be quickly corrected and the lost prestige restored to the teaching profession. "We must use the present unemployment challenge as an opportunity for restoration of this noble profession.
"To achieve this, more faculties of education should be opened in our tertiary institutions and special incentives provided for candidates so that they find education and teaching courses attractive again.
"In the mid-1970s and for a decade, the Federal Government paid special bursary to education students. There is need for such special incentive again, so that teachers are caught young and properly trained to teach. In this regard, we commend government's proper reading of this need and the move to make science, technology and education courses tuition-free in tertiary institutions."
"We recommend that specialisation in primary education should be emphasised in all of our education faculties and institutions so that we can give a firm foundation to our children," they pointed out at a recent forum.
The recruitment of the teachers is captured in the 2016 budget proposal, under the N500 billion voted for special intervention programme in the budget. Under this special intervention fund, the president also said government intended to partner with state and local governments to provide financial training and loans to market women, traders and artisans, through their cooperative societies as important platforms of creating jobs and providing opportunities for entrepreneurs.
"This will ensure our teachers, armed forces personnel, doctors, nurses, policemen, fire-fighters, prison service officers and many more critical service providers are paid competitively and on time," he added.
Good as the intention obviously is, the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT) has warned government not to politicise the promised recruitment of 500,000 teachers across the country.
The secretary-general of NUT, Mr Obong .J. Obong, while applauding the move, urged that only professionals should be employed in order to continue to develop the primary and secondary education.
He said: "The attention of the leadership of the Nigeria Union of Teachers has been drawn to the pronouncement of the Federal Government to recruit 500,000 teachers for the nation's basic education and secondary schools.
"This intention of the Federal Government is laudable and consistent with the demand of the Nigeria Union of Teachers for the employment of more professional teachers to address the long identified problem of shortage of manpower in the nation's basic education and secondary school system.
"It would be recalled that the National Executive Council of the union at its meeting of 16th December, 2015 insisted that this planned policy of the Federal Government should only accommodate professional teachers-graduate teachers and NCE holders and not quacks and personnel who have not been duly trained as teachers no matter their qualifications.
"The Nigeria Union of Teachers will support the Federal Government in the actualisation of this policy but wishes to caution the government against the temptation of using this policy as a means of compensation for political patronage as it was the practice in the past."
To avoid any form of confusion and misunderstanding on the matter, the NUT president, Comrade Michael Olukoya, urged government to fully integrate teachers in the programme to ensure adequate implementation of the policy.
He said government should carry the teachers along so that at the end of the day, it would not be an avenue for compensating the children of the rich.
"You and I know we have lot of universities and colleges of education and yearly graduate teachers that have not been gainfully employed and when the opportunity avails itself, I think it is only fair for the union to talk on their behalf.
"We want to appeal to the government if they are recruiting, they should not allow the politicians to hijack or compensate their political friends with the appointment," he further pointed out, arguing that engineers, lawyers, architects would not make good teachers in the classrooms.
As an editorial in one of the dailies pointed out, the bane of the country's system of education and its increasing inability to meet set standards is the very poor foundation pupils get in primary schools.
Accordingly, "it is important to teach all primary school teachers the importance of this level of education and with the high number of new graduate teachers that are to be injected into the system, there will be need for proper monitoring and evaluation of the scheme to ensure that the desired objective is achieved," it counseled.
All said, there is need to encourage professionalism and those among the new recruits who desire to make teaching a life-long career should be encouraged to achieve that and their remuneration should be made competitive.
SOURCE: ALL AFRICA.COM
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