Of unqualified South-West teachers

PROFESSOR Josiah Ajiboye’s recent announcement that 70 percent of teachers in private schools in the South-West region of the country lack requisite qualifications highlights the parlous state of the teaching profession in the country. As the Registrar of the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) and a professor of Social Studies and Environmental Education at the University of Ibadan, Ajiboye should know.

Speaking last week in Abuja at the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the RTCN and INSTILL Education, a South Africa-based “provider of education services intended to support educators and aspiring teachers across the African continent,” Professor Ajiboye was unambiguous: “A large number of teachers in private schools in Nigeria today are not qualified. We wanted to use a consultant to get revenue from teachers in private schools. When we carried out a survey, we observed that 70 percent of teachers in the South-West were not qualified.”

If Professor Ajiboye is to be believed, lack of qualifications is just one component of the travails of the teachers. According to him, a large number of teachers in Nigeria have never been exposed to training and are using outdated pedagogical equipment. Part of what makes Professor Ajiboye’s revelation particularly scary is that he was referring to teachers in private schools where, at least in theory, the quality of instruction and teaching facilities is superior to what obtains in public schools. If 70 percent of teachers in private schools lack the basic qualifications, what should be expected from their public school counterparts?

Unfortunately, watchers of the Nigerian education sector know the answer, and it is an understatement to say that the situation is quite ugly. Over the years, various state governors have raised the alarm on the quality of teachers in their respective schools. In 2017, outgoing governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, caused an uproar after a decision to sack 20,000 teachers for failing a competency test conducted by the state government. In June last year, another batch of 2,356 teachers, including the national president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), Audu Amba, were sacked after they had declined to sit that year’s competency test.

That the situation in Kaduna State with respect to the poor quality of teachers is a replica of what obtains across the rest of the country goes without saying—nor is the solution to the problem far-fetched. In the first place, authorities in the South-West—and needless to add, the rest of the country—must invest in training and retraining, particularly for teachers who do not have a background in education. Such training has to be systematic and continuous. Similarly, the problem of outdated pedagogical equipment can be easily resolved by ensuring that teachers have access to the most up-to-date pedagogical equipment. That being said, Professor Ajiboye’s revelation raises a series of antecedent issues bordering on due diligence. How, to begin with, did many so patently unqualified teachers get into the system? What cracks in the process of recruitment did they exploit? Until these questions are satisfactorily answered, there can be no guarantee that more unqualified teachers will not be recruited.

Ultimately, what the nation is witnessing is the outcome of decades of systematic neglect and degradation of the teaching profession and the subsequent proletarianization of teachers. It will take some time to turn things around.