President Buhari endorses sack of 21,000 Kaduna teachers

President Muhammadu Buhari has joined the debate over whether Kaduna State is right in its plan to sack 21,800 teachers.

The president says he’s in support of the move.

At a ministerial summit on education, Buhari said it’s a very serious situation when teachers cannot pass the exams they’re supposed to teach.

He also called for a sharpening of strategies for addressing the challenges of basic and secondary education.

On assumption of office as Kaduna governor in 2015, El-rufai had sworn to turn things around in the state’s educational sector.

He declared a state of emergency on education, and began the transformation of the sector.

Schools began receiving a facelift, and children were fed on a daily basis.

And then the state, through its universal basic education board embarked on a tour of the schools to appraise teachers.

The feedback from the officials was disappointing, to say the least. Among other things, they observed that the teachers could not communicate effectively.

Trainings were then organised, for them, but that did just a little, as most of them weren’t trainable.

In June this year, the state government subjected 33,000 of the teachers to a competency test. The said test was the standard for primary four pupils.

But disappointingly, more than 21,000 of them scored below the bar – less than 75 percent.

And while the state government seemed justified by the result, teachers under the aegis of the Nigeria Union of Teachers described the set pass mark as unjustifiable.

They claimed the government had set the points at variance with what had had been agreed.

The teachers subsequently gave the government a two-week ultimatum to rescind the decision, or risk them downing tools.

Organised labour, under the aegies of the Nigeria Labour Congress has also pitched its tent with the NUT.

On a daily basis, pupils from various public schools left their learning environments and hit the streets in demonstration.