Public policy is generally regarded as the instrumentality by which governments often attempt to ameliorate public problems and address matters of social concern. For any policy to achieve the desired goals or objectives and engender social stability, it must be well thought out and must also be an outcome of rigorous processes of data collection and data analysis about the issue it intends to address. For most of the developed countries, this of course is, the trajectory of most, if not all, their public policies, while for the developing countries, personal interest, ethnic bias, warped processes of data collection and analysis if any at all, political consideration, and nepotism have been the banes of their policy processes and the root causes of policy summersault and outright policy failure.
Recently, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara announced publicly and with all finality that the retirement age of teachers in primary and secondary schools in the country would be raised from 60 years to 65 years. Hear him: “we have done it for the tertiary institutions and the judiciary, so nothing should stop us from taking the bull by the horns. They say that wine gets better with age. It was the same consideration that motivated us to raise that of judges. So, this is something we can pursue.”
One, in making the pronouncement, the Speaker spoke as if he was the President. Methinks a government pronouncement on a policy proposal of this magnitude and profundity ought to have come from the President either as his party or government policy, though also with the knowledge of Dogara as a party leader. Is this not therefore, an indication that the All Progressive Congress is in disarray?
Two, I observed that, though education is on the concurrent legislative list, however, the federal government technically, neither has teachers in primary nor in secondary schools. True, the Federal Government has unity secondary schools, however, the teachers there are designated as Education Officers and they oscillate in their working career between the Federal Ministry of Education and the Unity Schools and they will still retire at 60 even if teachers’ retirement age is raised to 65. In the spirit of federalism therefore, is it proper for the federal government to be the authority to dictate to the states when their teachers would retire if not because our constitution is a pseudo-federal one? Is it not also proper for the states to be given consideration in this matter because of their differences and peculiarities?
Three, is the fact that it has been done for the judges and tertiary educational institutions enough justification for also wanting to concede it to primary and secondary school teachers? Should such policy move not be precipitated by very concrete reasons rather than by populism and proverbial saying?
In any event, let it be said that, retirement age in every country is as dynamic as the human society itself. Thus, there is nothing wrong in reviewing retirement age if there are reasonable basis for doing so. For instance, in Canada retirement age has been raised from 65 to 67 years. Justifying the move, the government said, “delaying retirement benefits, worth more than $6,000 a year, for 2 years, will encourage people to stay in the work force longer and save the government billions of dollars”. It was reported further that “Canadians are living longer and healthier. There are fewer workers to take their place when they retire. Old age security must change with it. But these changes are to take place not over the next few years, but also over the next generation. The adjustments may start in 2023 and phased gradually over six years”.
In this proposal by the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT), supported by Hon. Dogara, one could possibly discern only one justification, and such justification may even perhaps be apt for just a section of the federation. A close analysis of teachers’ distribution in Nigeria has revealed that, there are not enough qualified teachers of northern extraction in most of the states in the northern part of the country. Even the non-northern teachers employed by some northern states are usually engaged on contract basis and often leave with time for the fear of job insecurity. In order to mitigate this challenge, it may be reasonable to raise retirement age for teachers in northern states for now but must be done by their respective state governments based on their needs and not by the federal authority as it has been arrogated to it.The retirement age may not even be uniformly fixed by the states in the region. In the southern part of the country, the narrative is different. There are innumerable unemployed graduate teachers in the region. To create room for this army of unemployed youth therefore, it may be reasonable to leave retirement age at 60 if it can not even be reduced at the legislative discretion of each state in the region.
Also, we are in a country where most people don’t declare their true age. Thus even at 60 years, people do overstay in service by an average of between 3-5years. If increased, we may soon come to terms with massive inefficiency, ineffectiveness, unproductivity and more deaths in service granted our low life expectancy. Furthermore, when the retirement age of university teachers was reviewed, it rested majorly on shortage of Ph.D holders and dwindling rank of professors to mentor younger academics.
The question is: whom do primary and secondary school teachers want to mentor for all that long? Even at tertiary institutions level, while the basis for the raise for non-teaching staff remains unconvincing, it is still debatable whether the review has really helped the university system as there allegedly exists today, unproductive academic and non-academic workers and barely active or healthy professors and more deaths in the 65-70 age bracket. Ditto with the judges. Let it be also said that, all the reviewed figures of retirement age of the developed countries cited above were not arbitrarily arrived at by them. They were arrived at after a meticulous and rigorous analysis of labuor trends in those countries by their governments and not on mere agitation or suspicious lobbying. The question then is: how did we even arrive at 65 years for teachers? Has it not been arbitrarily copied from other climes? Perhaps if the realities of our country are taken into consideration, retirement age could be 62, 63, 70 or even less than 60 for different states and sectors.
One even doubts whether labour leaders have ever paused and researched hard to find out whether higher retirement age will serve the interest of the workers and the larger society better in the long run. In any event, I think what is obtainable in the Indian federation should be the model or frame-work for Nigeria as a federal state. In India, both the federal and state authorities have the constitutional right to fix retirement age based essentially on needs. At the federal level in India, the retirement age generally is 60 years while it varies from state to state and service to service. The air force staff retire at 57 years. For example, in Haryana, a North India state near New Delhi, the state government is considering raising the retirement age of medical doctors working in government hospitals in the state from 58 years to 65 years as a result of shortage of medical doctors in that state not on mere agitation or in pursuit of populism. Today, Nigeria has numerous unemployed and under employed doctors. In the light of this and in the spirit of true federalism and the need to stem the tide of joblessness in our country, and prevent the risks of inefficiency, ineffectiveness and unproductivity among other dangers, the states should be allowed to determine the retirement age of their teachers, while the federal and state governments might even take a second look at the existing retirement ages in the tertiary educational institutions and the judiciary to ascertain if the existing retirement ages in the two institutions have really been achieving the desired objectives in the face of the gargantuan unemployment and under employment that pervade the country.
- Dr. Adebisi is of the Federal College of Agriculture, Akure.
