The Upper Crust

Kaduna Teachers: Where training should end

 

With Uche Nnadozie

A lot has been said about the Kaduna teachers debacle. And a lot still needs to be said, because it appears it is until the very all is said, this country hardly recognises a problem even while it stares menacingly. There should not be any controversy when it comes to matters affecting the future of the country where it concerns education, but in a political environment everything is possible. Otherwise some of the voices of dissent over the shameful conduct of Kaduna teachers should have been mute.
Where you have 21, 000 teachers fail a competency test set for primary four pupils, ladies and gentlemen there is nothing to train in those teachers. People should understand work place rule of training or re-training. On the job training is not for folks who do not possess the competence that their certificate confers on them. If you are a mass communication or journalism graduate, on the job training is not to teach you five Ws and H. The role of on the job training is to expand your basic knowledge in journalism so as to be effective in getting better contacts where you can tap news, house style, etc.
Whenever you begin to train a mass communication graduate about what news is, pyramid structure, nose for news and all that, then the person is not a journalist. Therefore, such a person may have to pay to be trained as a journalist. The best place to do that is not in the newsroom but at the University or polytechnic. Retaining such staff is not a right, its a privilege. But teaching should not have such luxury. Its either you know or you don’t. You may lack teaching skills, but you must not lack knowledge. You must be knowledgeable to teach. If not you will be teaching ignorance.
It is that ignorance that has enveloped our society. I have often stated that if we do not get our education right, we will never get our value system, national ethos and societal morality right. And those have consequences. Very deep consequences. The absence of morality breeds corruption and other social and government vices. With fake teachers, what you get is an explosive decadent educational system. Do we still wonder
why there is so much cheating during examinations? The external examination malpractices are nothing compared to what obtains from school exams and continuous assessment.
Teachers who lack knowledge can only do two things: collect money from pupils/students/parents or have sex with them to pass them after examination. The same people get into universities continue the bribery and get out to continue the bribery at work places or government offices. We know the truth but nobody wants to confront it. Yet, we see this nonsense everyday with the difficulty we face getting people to do the work they were employed. Bosses now have to do five peoples’ work to keep organisations going. Because the quality is terrible. Its irredeemable. Its insane. But we rather play the ostrich. Ostrich pays us because we are all mostly involved at different levels.
The Nigeria Union of Teachers, NUT and the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC should hide their faces in shame. There should be a limit to blackmail and chicanery. The teachers you claim to fight for are ab initio not teachers. They are floaters. They do not deserve their wages. One would have thought that labour unions should also pay attention to what their members do. What good is there in a system that do not
care about the competence of their own members. This scenario should not have been allowed to fester. This crisis is what the labour unions should have handled in-house because it is disgraceful by all ramifications.
Or will the NUT or NLC members who are making noise send their wards to these teachers to acquire knowledge? Is it because the so called teachers teach kids of the poor, then whatever they do is ok? But that’s wickedness. While NUT and NLC officials have their kids in private schools, the children of the poor are sent to fake people to be taught. if we want a better future for the children of the rich, then the children of the poor must be better educated today. Although we see the disaster years of fake teaching has brought but not stopping them now is an invitation to anarchy in future.
Kaduna and some other states suffer from a lot of kids out of school. These kids end up being beggars and sometimes suicide bombers. They didn’t end up with those vices over night. When those who manage to go to school learn nothing, those who never wanted to get education are justified. Everyone then ends up on the streets. Also, people complain about cut off marks for unity schools where kids from Kaduna and such places are admitted into unity schools with ridiculous marks whereas their counterparts in other states are made to compete at very high standards. Of course, how can a Kaduna kid compete with the miserable teachers?
Not stopping the teachers’ cartel now means the three marks for Kaduna pupil to gain admission as against Anambra’s 140 will persist. That is what Governor Nasir el-Rufai is trying to fix. We should rather commend him. It takes a man of steel to confront powerful unions in any society much less a struggling third world Nigeria. I hope other states will be bold enough. The problem cuts across the country.so should attract a national debate and surgery. All states and the Federal Government should find a way to test our teachers. Teachers should be proud people, not folks who are jittery all the time as a result of their incompetence. The matter of fake teachers must stay above politics.

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