FOR the first time in over two years, Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, has finally happened upon a popular cause befitting his populism. After compelling primary school teachers to take a proficiency test designed for Primary Four pupils, and seeing more than two-thirds of them fail, he has given the order to recruit about 25,000 teachers to replace some 21,780 of them who flunked the test. Unable to bring himself to describe the failed teachers as sacked, he has hovered precariously and undecidedly between using the word ‘replacement’ to qualify what he intends to do with them, and merely suggesting that they would be removed from the payroll. Except to him, few, especially the teachers themselves and their activist unions, were left puzzled by what their fate would be in a matter of weeks.
The support for Mallam el-Rufai’s measure to sanitise the teaching profession at the elementary level has been both uproarious and intoxicating. Even the normally even-tempered and quick-witted Shehu Sani (Senate–Kaduna Central) has been wrong-footed by the populist and often unreflective governor. Sen Sani had argued that by deciding to sack the about 22,00 teachers, the governor was cruelly using politics to settle scores and anticipate and scheme for the next elections. The senator is himself an activist. It is not surprising that he threw in his lot with the labour unions and teachers, for he often reads far deeper insights into policies and measures than the ordinary man on the street, and in most instances, even far more than the governor himself. But on this matter, the public is unforgiving. In their opinion, the governor is courageously tackling a sordid malady that predated him, one his predecessors had treated with kid gloves.
The premise of the governor’s populist fury is simple and engaging. Teachers who could not pass Primary Four tests have no business teaching anyone. With education in Kaduna floundering, and with the state’s students performing woefully in national examinations, there would be no room for any sentiment in applying drastic remedies to what has seemed to be a cancerous problem. Even the suspicion and argument that the governor got his analysis wrong by failing to see the state’s education problem as systemic rather than isolated, has seemed distant. It did not help that many analysts have lathered the problem with the sentimental rhetoric that suggests that no parent would like his children to be taught by the near illiterates who for many years passed themselves off as teachers in the grandest and avuncular sense.
It is hard to see the labour unions winning either the argument or the fight. They are fighting a lost cause. Nor is there a cat in hell’s chance that Sen Sani will have the upper hand in the fight to retain the about 22,000 teachers. They are a bad case, and can hardly be retained under any guise or argument. Indeed, the labour unions, particularly the teachers’ union, have no reason to stick to their guns. The 25,000 teachers that will be recruited, the so-called replacement specialists, will not only inexorably become union members, they will swell the ranks of the powerful club of teaching activists with their superior education and skills, and with their winsome credentials and swag. It’s a win-win for the unions, government and education sector, not to say the poor, bedraggled parents who had long resigned themselves to fate and pondered whether any of their children attending those misfit schools could ever successfully run the gauntlet of bad teachers, cruel and merciless national examinations and increasingly competitive socio-economic systems.
Mallam el-Rufai can be forced to step down on some issues. It is hard to see him climbing down on this. Sen Sani should have picked his fight well. On this matter of the impending sack of teachers, the governor cannot lose, and the senator cannot win. The unions will be worsted, and the senator will have egg on his face. If they think they can ambush the governor in the coming polls, they and all their 22,000-strong sacked teachers, they will meet the 25,000 newly recruited teachers who give their loyalty first and foremost, as the senator feared, to Mallam el-Rufai. Ex-United States president George H. Bush might have won Gulf War I in 1991 and lost the following year’s presidential election; there is no way Mallam el-Rufai can be harmed by the sacked teachers case. His enemies should pick different causes and implements to bludgeon the governor, for he is not beyond being beaten.
When barely two months after he assumed office in 2015 Mallam el-Rufai banned street begging, which he described as humiliating, he had run full tilt into a political storm that robbed him of his carefully cultivated image as an empathetic, pro-people politician. Street begging was not a profession, he had argued with unfeeling, superior airs and undisguised sarcasm. But his opponents tell him it is a socio-economic, if not even cultural, reality that can neither be wished away nor legislated into oblivion. It is the same brusqueness that backfired in the case of the beggars that Mallam el-Rufai is applying, perhaps tactlessly, to the case of the unqualified teachers. Begging was a systemic problem in Kaduna when the governor confronted it, just as the failed teachers phenomenon is systemic. Both require not just boldness and courage, which virtues the governor has in abundance, but holistic and overarching approaches and solutions. The governor’s style, as exemplified by the malaises undermining economic and political developments in Kaduna, suggests he is finding it difficult to adequately and analytically appreciate the import of the problems, let alone conceive the right remedies.
Begging and failed teachers are undoubtedly a problem, among many other problems, for Kaduna. But the question Mallam el-Rufai does not ask himself is what kind of problems they are, and whether his solutions suit and soothe the crises he seems perfectly placed idiosyncratically to worsen by his natural inflexibility, insensitivity and sometimes arrogance. Mallam el-Rufai is of course not always right even when he is populist and superficial, as his approach to the herdsmen attacks and regulation of religions in the state show. Indeed, he may have an instinctive grasp of the problems that confront the state, even if the complex composition of their cores escape him; but he often weakens his cause by his insufferable style and sweeping, superficial generalisations. Quite characteristically, his problem is that his activism nearly always gets the better of him.
Mallam el-Rufai will win the failed teachers argument, and it will show him as a firm, courageous and quick-witted governor. But it will not show him as a manager of men, as an inspiration, as a methodical leader and politician, and as a caring and visionary leader more intent on changing the circumstances of the people than on winning arguments and wrong-footing opponents. The governor’s idiosyncrasies are cast in granite. He is too old and has repeatedly profited from his constant resort to disingenuousness and opportunism to be amenable to change. He will continue to use the morass that envelopes Kaduna as a pretext for harsh and sometimes cruel measures. He will refuse to be persuaded to recognise that the Kaduna teachers’ conundrum can be resolved more systemically, far more rewardingly, and with far less costs than he has abrasively and emotionally embraced and sold.
The Kaduna teachers’ issue is in fact a rather simple problem that could have been resolved without the melodrama with which Mallam el-Rufai has encased it. The publicity rankled, including the public display of teachers’ spectacular test failures, as much as the governor’s loud asseverations of his unassailable position and polemical superiority. He could of course bring to public knowledge the problems the state was confronting in the education sector, and seek the people’s understanding. Next he could seek the accommodation and understanding of the unions, reassuring them that the government would not undermine their cohesion. Then he could begin quietly weeding out, in phases, the undesirable elements in the teaching profession. The controversy was never about whether those who couldn’t teach should be replaced. They must be. The controversy was how the governor hoped, perhaps with minimum pain, to deliver the change that would benefit the education sector, transfer the soon-to-be-unemployed into other productive jobs, and comprehensively reform the entire state administrative structure, not just in education, that promotes mediocrity and stultifies development.
In his response to Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, who mocked the governor for planning to retrench about 22,000 teachers, Mallam el-Rufai talked disingenuously of replacement in place of sack. It was obvious the immensely emotional Kaduna governor had not spared time to ponder the anomaly and consequences of sacking so many people regardless of their lack of qualification and wrongful recruitment into the public service. Whether he likes it or not, and despite his vindication and massive public support, he will have to re-examine his methods and plans all over again. Even if the exercise would not cost him votes, he must still take a second look at the issue, for it is certain to affect his legacy in ways he has probably not anticipated. The controversy goes beyond the teachers conundrum; it touches on his style of governance, a style that affects everything, both present and future, a style that has made him to be execrated even by those who mentored him but now speak of him in very unflattering terms.
Mallam el-Rufai is immensely gifted, intellectual and bold, and he has a knack for seeking out for attention the grave issues that convulse the society, whether nationally or his beloved Kaduna. But seeing how cocksure of everything he has become over the years, and how infallible he places himself in the scheme of things, it must apparently be a conspiracy engineered by the heavens to attenuate his gifts by imbuing him with a fondness for romanticization, melodrama and offensive display of brusqueness unparalleled even in those on whose agile but unyielding backs he climbed unworthily into prominence.
