Teachers’ incompetence is a national calamity —Alhassan Bawa Mohammed

Alhaji Alhassan Bawa Mohammed is the executive chairman, Niger State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB). In this interview by ADELOWO OLADIPO, he speaks about the various intervention programmes of the board, among other issues:

How did the board recruit teachers and what is the minimum requirement for the exercise?

That is part of the snags that remain with us right now: recruitment and payment of salaries. Since my assumption of office as the chairman of the board, these have been handled by the various local governments through the Ministry for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs. It is supposed to be our responsibility as far as the law establishing the board is concerned, but the Ministry for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs has been undertaking the payment of teachers. We have hundreds of teachers that we had submitted their names to be delisted either as a result of retirement or death, which are yet to be treated. The money still remains there intact, while the classrooms are there vacant. This is part of the clog in the wheel of the progress of this board.

How do you ensure the remuneration of the teachers that are supposed to be under the direct supervision of your board?

Like I said, their remuneration has to do with the regular payment of their salaries, and then their promotions. Right now, we have set the machinery in motion to try and go round the 25 local governments of the state, one after the other. We will not ask them to leave their places of work; rather, we will follow them to the place, do the necessary screening through their files and then get our data set for those who are due for promotion. The remuneration is this: those that we find to have been doing well, we have got approval from Mr. Governor (to reward them). We have given commendation to a teacher and rewarded him by giving him a motorcycle, cash gift and clothes for his wife. I think that is a good encouragement for him and others who may also be aspiring to record success in their respective places of work. We would have done more, but this is just one-year assessment, because we are not up to two years yet on the board.

Now that the Ministry of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs has removed some of the powers of the board, what is the monitoring mechanism for both the primary and secondary schools teachers in the state?

That is a matter for concern. If they are not adding anything, they should return that responsibility of payment back to the board; they should note that there is what is called some ordered deductions which the individual teachers or as a body embarked upon why they have their co-operative laws. They have their end-well contributions which they made, and these monies have to be deducted and paid to these organisations or bodies where that individual or group of teachers signed that agreement with. And these deductions were done. Recently, we had a case in Paikoro Local Government where they said a certain amount of money was deducted from the teachers’ salaries but it was not remitted to that body. There is neither a moral nor legal justification for anyone to deduct teachers’ contributions from their salaries on their behalf and not remit such monies to their accounts or the accounts of their parent body, which is the state unit of NUT. That is evil.

As a board saddled with the responsibility of recruitment, monitoring, discipline and protecting the interest of the teachers under you, what are you doing that there is no recurrence of what happened to teachers in Paikoro Local Government in any other local government in the state?

Recently, we had a marathon management meeting; and at the meeting we agreed and we disagreed. But then as the chairman of the board, there are some other visions I have got somewhere else which I think I should apply here. And one of them is that all the education secretaries are going back to their local governments. My reason is that the local governments nominated three people, then we administered an aptitude test on them and we took them; whereas in some other local governments, the nominations had been based on sentiments, biases, political inclinations among others. Why is it that I will present my own material to come and serve my own people, then you will present a charlatan and at the end you will insist that your own mediocre should be taken after which you will say that we should swap them. By doing that, my candidate will go and serve your people, while your own will come and serve my people. That cannot work.

The feeling in some quarters in Niger State is that the state government is more concerned about the structures of the public schools than the performance of the students

That is very, very interesting. Look at that photograph on the wall. What is there is 2016 International Day of the Girl Child. You can see students from all over Nigeria taking photograph with the Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki, in conjunction with Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso and some other senators at the National Assembly, Abuja. In this tournament, Niger State emerged the crown bearer of the International Day of the Girl Child, 2016 edition. Secondly, last year, our students were in Singapore. This year, our students were in Czech Republic for an international debate known as Heart of Europe Debate, and it will interest you to know that Niger State students from the public schools represented Nigeria and we named those children as Abubakar Lolo Babes, out of the eight tournaments they had participated in, won four. It was the first of its kind in this state.

Despite your perceived achievements, there are still communities outside the state capital where pupils are still being kept in classrooms with dilapidated walls, with no roofing sheets, chairs and tables; pupils sit on the floor to receive lessons.

What you are seeing on the ground did not come up last month or last year or even during the life of this administration. These are things that had been there for the past eight or 10 years ago. I keep telling people that even at the end of this administration, we will only have tried our best because of the enormous rot in the education sector of the state, particularly at both the primary and secondary schools. But people who say they have visited schools in Minna, the state capital, where pupils sit on the floors, have they visited Magama, Rijau or Tarffa local governments of the state to see the levels of the rot in those councils? If this could happen in Minna, then they should expect the worst scenarios in the rural areas of the state. I keep asking people: what have they been doing since the inception of the democratic experience in the country and they were not calling the attention of successive administrations to the rot in the schools in their respective communities?

So far, how have you been able to impact positively on the lives of the people of the state, especially the pupils in the public schools in the state?

The basic impact we as a board are making is that we ensure that where a job is given, we go out and work. I can tell you that in Niger SUBEB, we don’t have either Monday to Friday working days; rather, the entire board members, even on Saturdays and Sundays, you will find us working. You will see us supervising our contractors even on Sundays. Earlier this year in Paikoro, Magama and in Borgu local governments, rainstorm brought down complete villages, especially in Borgu Local Government. In one of the cases, the rainstorm killed one of the village heads in the council areas. Also in that village, a school was overtaken by rainstorm. So, in our next intervention, with the little scarce resources, we have to attend to that particular village, because they do not even have a single classroom standing now.

During the past administration in Niger State, we heard about cases of teachers who could neither spell nor write their names. There have also been reports from other states where teachers failed examinations meant for Primary Four pupils

It is a national calamity. I went to a school where the teacher said she holds a Nigerian Certificate in Education and I wanted to take the photograph of her lesson with the pupils in each particular subject, to capture it in our next intervention programme. The first thing I asked her was to write the name of the village (where she was teaching) in Mashedu Local Government boldly on the blackboard. But to my utmost dismay, that teacher could neither spell nor write down the name of the village. It was the photographer who went with me that saved the situation. She collected the chalk from her and wrote it for the teacher who claimed she had NCE! Is that not a national calamity? We have that problem also in Niger State. And one thing we want to do is meet with the village heads, district heads and other important stakeholders like our emirs and religious leaders so that they will see the need to let us correct this anomaly Chezck in our education system.