President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday expressed his support to the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai, over moves to sack 21,780 teachers.
The teachers had recently failed the competency test conducted by the state government.
Speaking during a special retreat of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) on the challenges facing the Education sector in Nigeria themed: “Education in Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects”, the President decried a situation where teachers were not different from their students in terms of learning.
He also lamented the bad condition of the nation’s education sector with 13.2 million children out of school.
The President said “To digress a little bit so that you know that I meant what I read.
“Having been an orphan, I still feel that whatever I did in life so far was built by boarding school. For nine years was in boarding school, three in primary and six in secondary school.
“In those days, teachers treat their students or children like their own children. If you did well they will tell you, you did well, if you don’t do well they never spared the rod.
“When I finished my secondary school, I didn’t work for a day, I refused to work for a day, I left home, I refused to work in the local government, and then I joined the army. And the army of that time we went through all we went through up-to the civil war.
“And then I listened to one of the Nigerians I respect, he said after his training here in Nigeria and the United States, he went to his alma mata, his primary school to see what he could contribute. I won’t mention his name but when he went, he couldn’t differentiate between the students, the children and the teachers.
“And what El-Rufai is trying to do now is exactly what that man told me about 10 years ago. It is a very serious situation, when teachers cannot pass their exams that they are supposed to teach the children to pass.
“It is a very tragic situation we are in and this our gathering together to me is one of the most important in this administration.” he said
The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu stressed that no nation can rise above the standard of its education as education serves as a springboard for every kind of development.
He said “If education is weak or dysfunctional, society and its development will also be weak and dysfunctional. And all change including our very Change Agenda begins with education; because it is education that shapes, corrects and restores society. But to be able to restore order to society, education has to be made a national priority.
“This truism is valid for every society and is of particular relevance for our own society which, we all agree is confronted with a litany of challenges and deficits.
“Education offers us the knowledge, tools, skills and attitudes with which to address and surmount these challenges, to correct and overcome inhibiting deficits, and to put our country on the path of accelerated development and sustainable change. Your Excellency, permit me to share a story l read about the Chinese. In their determination to build, and live in, a peaceful society, they built the Great Wall believing that it would keep invaders at bay; because they thought it was impossible for anyone to scale it, given its insurmountable height.
“However, within the first century of the construction of the wall, the Chinese were invaded three times. Every time the invaders came, they had no need to climb over the wall; because each time they came, they were able to bribe the guards on duty at the gate, and the gate was opened for them. The Chinese took pains to build the wall but they forgot to build the character of the guards who were supposed to secure the walls.
“The great lesson of this story is that character-building proceeds wall-building And character is everything: as one of the Orientalists once said: “If you want to destroy the civilization of a nation, there are three ways of doing so: 1) destroy the family structure 2) destroy education and 3) lower role models
“In Germany and Finland, for example, the highest paid professionals are teachers. They are better paid than judges, doctors, engineers, accountants, and so on. When Chancellor Angela Markel, was asked by the engineers, doctors and judges to pay them the same salary as teachers, she told them, “How can I compare you to those who taught you?” This is the logical perception and attitude that Nigeria’s leadership should have of education am strongly persuaded that if we offer automatic scholarship to students who take education, and automatic employment and a preferential compensation package to those who take to teaching as a profession, our system will improve tremendously. If we give regulatory agencies the teeth to bite and do their work, mediocre teachers will soon disappear from our classrooms.
“If we insist on professionalism with appropriate deadlines set for those who teach, the situation will improve phenomenally. We can minimize and in due course eliminate mediocrity in the education sector.” he said
According to him, Nigeria must return to development planning if the nation is to develop.
“There is need to harmonize the learning and teaching that transpire in our tertiary institutions as well as re-define our national goals periodically. Since independence and up to the time Your Excellency was military head of state, this nation had had National Development Plan and we must return to development planning if this nation to develop; else, it will remain one vast landscape of unconnected contracts, and disconnected researchers unable to connect their work with national development policies and vision.
“Already, the Federal Ministry of Education has commenced work in all three areas with the publication of our Ministerial Strategic Plan on education, which anticipated, and is therefore in line with, the recently approved Economic Recovery and Growth Plan.
“Our education should drive our national development objectives and we need to carry the universities and other tertiary institutions along. We vocational training centres and give our technical have to revive our attention schools adequate and requisite Mr. President, to achieve the desired change that education needs, there is need for improved funding and a measure of political will in national governance. Such is the weight of the problems that beset our education and the deleterious it has had on our national development efforts that I believe that this Retreat should end with a declaration of a state of emergency in education so that we can face the challenges frontally and squarely.
“These challenges are not insurmountable: what is needed is vastly improved funding accompanied by a strong political will. The strong political will needed to do all this is present in this government. What this government must now do is to make the funds available.
“Your Excellency, nobody has the moral and resource capacity to intervene promptly, substantially and sustainably in all areas of education provisioning better than the government. Unfortunately, from 1999 to date, the annual budgetary allocation to education has always been between four per cent and ten per cent. None of the E9 or D8 countries other than Nigeria allocates less than 20 percent of its annual budget to education.
“Indeed even among sub-Saharan Africa countries, we are trailing far behind smaller and less endowed nations in terms of our investment in education. There is therefore need for a major investment in education in the national interest. A clear guide, Your Excellency, is the costing of the APC campaign promises in education which shows that after four years, would be minimum of one Naira per annum, required to fulfill your thirteen promises.”
All change, he said, must begin with education, because, if education is gotten right, other areas of national life in Nigeria will be right and fall in line,” he stated.
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