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Teaching with tears •When teachers are denied their reward

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3 years ago

After 28 years of celebrating World Teachers’ Day globally, the tales surrounding the fate of teachers in their profession in Nigeria have remained largely unchanged. In this report, many teachers shared their plights and challenges facing their profession with ADEOLA OTEMADE.

Teaching is considered one of the noble professions in the world. It demands not only sufficient knowledge, tolerance, and patience on the part of the teacher, but also the transfer of these traits in such a way that learning is ensured.

Teachers serve as vehicles for shaping and preparing young people for the future. They provide inspiration; impart morals, values, and a positive attitude in people. A well-known historian, Henry Brooks Adam, in his appraisal of the ennobling roles of teachers in the society conferred on them the status of immortality. According to Adam, a “… teacher affects eternity; he can never determine where his impacts cease.”

Annually, on October 5, teachers are celebrated for their contributions to society at large. The celebration was established in 1994 to mark the adoption of the 1966 recommendation concerning the status of teachers from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and International Labour Organization (ILO).

Since then, the fate of teachers in Nigeria, has not improved significantly. Sunday Tribune spoke to teachers and union leaders who shared the same stories of complaints and problems that have plagued the profession over the years. Nothing really, they revealed, has changed despite calling attention to them. The problems include backlog of unpaid salaries, poor pay, unfavourable working conditions, lack of adequate teaching materials, and numerous other problems.

Poor/Delayed Salary Payments

Although findings by Sunday Tribune revealed that changes are being recorded in the area of prompt payment of salaries by the government in some states, the problem of poor remuneration still remains.

According to the chairman of National Union of Teachers, Oyo State Wing, Comrade Raji Oladimeji Ismail, teachers in some states of the federation still experience delay in payment of their salaries while many are not receiving their full salalries in some other states, disclosing that this category of teachers are merely paid a certain percentage which is not up to 50 per cent of their take-home.

“There is (this) poor remuneration among all our teachers. In some states of this country, some of our teachers have not been paid for close to six months, while in some others, teachers are paid by (a certain) percentage which is not even up to half of their salary. So there is stagnation in the payment of teachers. This is not good, if allowances and promotions are not given to teachers; our teachers just go to work without having anything to show for it. When teachers are not well-taken care of, they can’t perform their duties well, but when they are taken care of, they work joyfully with so much happiness in them,” Comrade Ismail said.

Tolulope Olanrewaju, a teacher at Odomola Junior Secondary School in Epe, Lagos State, told Sunday Tribune that one of the challenges teachers face is poor salary, as the take-home is always insufficient given the current economic condition in the nation.

“I am being paid a remuneration less than six digits. And the take-home may not be enough because human wants are unlimited and needs are insatiable, coupled with the current situation of the country, many of us have had to source for supporting businesses on the side. Teachers are not well paid enough. We know of other countries and how their workers are paid, but here in Nigeria, we are not well paid; our salaries are not enough for us to feed our families, reason most youths shy away from teaching,” he explained.

Still speaking on poor remuneration of teachers, Miss Olunfunke Akinale, a teacher at Ransome Kuti Memorial Junior Grammar School, Surulere, Lagos, said she now relies on co-operative society to achieve her personal goals because her salary is just small.

“The take-home is not enough to take me home at all. Ninety-five per cent of us rely on our co-operative societies to achieve lots of things, even sending our children to institutions of higher learning. Had it been we do not have the co-operative societies, many of us could have resigned. How much are we paid at the end of the month? Before the month ends, debts here and there are waiting to gulp the little we earn,” she lamented.

Insufficient Teaching Aids

Some of the teachers who spoke with Sunday Tribune also complained about insufficient teaching aids, claiming that most of them often resort to sourcing materials themselves for teaching purposes.

Though some of them like Ogunde Gabriel, a teacher at Army Children Junior High School, LASU Road, Epe, Lagos, believe that given the state of the country, teaching aids cannot be made available to all teachers at the same time, the basic ones should at least be provided including regular of teaching professionals.

“The measures to ensuring they are available are for the school management to equip their teachers with adequate knowledge through seminars, workshops, and symposia that will expose them to various ways of deriving learning aids. The teachers should be ready to improvise and have a creative mind.

“As an Agricultural Science teacher, I do source for teaching materials myself. It gives me room to research and learn in the process. As a teacher, it is expected that one should source for teaching materials. A good reader will produce good leaders. Therefore, it is pertinent for teachers to be ready to provide teaching materials to support the delivery of the lesson,” he explained.

Miss Akinale, however, disagrees. She believes that it is the government’s responsibility to provide teachers with teaching and learning aids, adding that most of the available books in the libraries are outdated.

“Teaching aids are not available and as a matter of fact, even books in the library are outdated. You can’t visit the library and get updated books; the students can’t use the library, because the books are outdated. Oftentimes I get textbooks myself. I surf the internet to get more information on what to teach. Not that we rely on the government to provide everything for us, but to some extent, the bulk of materials to be used is on the government. We have to source for teaching materials ourselves,” she said.

Saseyi Olawunmi, also a teacher, at Community Junior Academy, Epe, Lagos, corroborated Akinale’s submission noting that teaching materials are not sufficient, and most times teachers have to make do with what they have.

“Teaching materials are not available all the time. For me I source for materials, I get textbooks, literature texts and make use of the internet; some of the teaching materials in our schools are old and you can’t get the information needed. Some are torn with the important pages gone; we are left with sourcing for instructional materials by ourselves. The laboratories are not well-equipped and students do not have access to the library. All these are the challenges we teachers face,” she added.

Unfavourable Working Conditions

Comrade Ismail while speaking on the conditions teachers work under in the country revealed that the situation is unfathomable. The work environment, he said, is not safe, especially in the Northern part of the country owing to insecurity.

“I would love to talk about the issue of insecurity in the Northern states of the federation. We have recorded several security breaches, especially in the North-East where we lost so many teachers to bandits and insurgency. We heard of the case in Maiduguri, where some people entered into a school and took our students. Those are some of the issues teachers have been facing in the North.

“But apart from that, in the South-West, we have noticed so many instances where students molest their teachers. As this is happening in the North, it is also happening here in the South and also in other geopolitical zones of the country. However, the security issue is the first on the list; if that one is solved by government, then other problems too can be solved.

“Some conditions under which we are working are not friendly enough; secondly, we have more dilapidated schools now, with buildings in poor and deplorable state. Most of the facilities provided for the schools are not working and most of these schools look rough. Most times, you see some hoodlums entering the schools to steal. In some schools, we don’t have chairs, tables, and chalkboards. There are some schools you get to where you see some students sitting at the window or on the floor just to receive lessons from their teachers.

“Another thing is that the government is not sincere with education. The bedrock of every development or organization in every nation is education. The government has not been awarding enough budgets to education in various states of the federation. So, as we are blaming the federal government, we also need to blame the state governments; they have been giving very low allocation to education. With this low budget, how would it help us to cope?

“The little amount they allocate to education will never go a long way to develop the education sector of the states. In Oyo State, we have 20 per cent of the budget allocated to us, giving the state the opportunity to recruit teachers of almost about 5000. If there had not been an increase in the budget, government won’t have been able to do such a thing. Therefore, one can see the importance of budgetary allocations to the education sector,” he explained.

But this is not all, both Akinale and Olanrewaju claimed teachers are usually subjected to all manner of insult and mockery from parents and disrespect from their students.

“The poor environment ranges from family backgrounds to the larger environment. Teachers are treated with little respect and people tend to forget we are life-builders. Parents disrespect teachers for correcting their children; there is a lot more than meets the eye. At times, they tend to forget that we are human too and we also have families. The conditions are not really friendly and, at times, there is too much pressure from government and even parents,” Akinale rued just as Olanrewaju said the emotional trauma teachers are daily subjected to has nearly reduced them to sub-human in the society.

Also speaking on physical and emotional abuse of teachers, Mr Olanrewaju said teachers are frequently mocked, humiliated, ridiculed and treated as if they are people who are of no use to society.

“Teachers have also endured the most humiliation of all professions. They have been victimised by the economy, ridiculed by uneducated youth, ignored by a culture that exalts wealth and power, and even blackmail. This, however, tends to make individuals feel discouraged,” he lamented.

The changes we desire to see

In his submission, Comrade Raji Ismail implored the government to place more value on education by equipping schools and making the welfare of teachers essential through implementation of programmes that favour them.

“If governments can find solutions to all these by supplying equipment to schools, students would be happy to go to school and teachers would be happy to teach their students. In some other states of the country, there are schools where there is shortage of teachers. Government needs to employ more teachers,” he said.

On his part, Olanrewaju said government needs to motivate teachers to work by initiating programmes that can develop them mentally and physically.

“There are many things the government can do to make teaching more comfortable,” he reasoned. “This includes infrastructure development. It is also not enough to recruit competent and qualified teachers; they must be properly motivated. If teachers are not properly motivated, they can never perform optimally.

Ironically, the problems highlighted are not new to concerned authorities. It behoves on the government at all levels to find lasting solutions to those problems so as to make teaching and learning enjoyable activity across the country. Unfortunately, these problems may still be staring Nigerian teachers in the face even when the next edition of World Teachers’ Day is being celebrated next year

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