One of the highlights in the N6.08 Trillion federal budget for 2016 as presented to the joint session of the National Assembly yesterday, December 22, by President Muhammadu Buhari, was the promised teaching job for 500,000 unemployed graduates across the country.
The President, who described his determination to partner with State and Local Governments to recruit, train and deploy 500,000 unemployed graduates and NCE holders as an emergency measure, said that such measure is being aimed at addressing the chronic shortage of teachers in public schools across the country.
These graduate teachers, Buhari explained, will be deployed to primary schools, thereby, enhancing the provision of basic education, especially in the rural areas.
Indeed, if there is any one policy of the government that has sought to address three national challenges in one fell swoop, it is this proposal for the employment of half a million fresh teachers, especially at the primary school level.
First and foremost, the move would address the issue of unemployment itself. As a matter of fact, the nation has been producing thousands and thousands of graduates every year, even as the employment opportunities get thinner, no thanks to many factors, one of which is the closure of many vibrant factories and industrial estates. There is no gain saying the fact that the situation of graduate unemployment has been posing a serious embarrassment not only to the parents and relations of the graduates, but to the collective interest and pride of the nation.
The situation became more insulting to our collective sensibility when unemployment suddenly became an object of political maneouvre in the past governments, so much that even the graduate unemployed themselves fell flat for it.
The Buhari’s pronouncement and its eventual practicalisation would go a long way to produce multiple productive effects on the family of the beneficiaries. One person so employed, for example, may end up feeding or caring for an average of four people down the line, which translates into smiles being put on the faces of no fewer than two million Nigerians.
The measure would also have positive and multiple effects on the education itself. Besides the fact that it would address shortage of manpower in the system, it would also improve poor academic works in most cases.
We in Greenbarge Reporters were gladdened by the President’s specific reference to primary school education as the target for the half a million teachers to be employed. It is at this foundation level that the nation’s education began to limp and which has contributed largely in baking half-literate graduates of higher institutions. This is also why the inclusion of training or capacity building for the 500,000 new teachers is seen by many as a far reaching progressive move to salvage the entire education sector. It would have amounted to pretending on the part of the government to talk of quantity (employing more teachers) without looking into quality (capacity building or training). Frankly, the Nigerian public school education has been infested by so many negative challenges that it is almost difficult for one to know where to start from.
For a long time, the quality of the products of the nation’s public schools, from the basic to the tertiary levels, has whittled down to glorified ‘educated’ with no ‘substance’.
This, and other factors might have brought about the seeming disdain with which members of the public and the government treat teachers. As a matter of fact, teachers are today, still the least respected even from the point of view of take home pay, so much that no student would pray to become a teacher in his or her life.
Where a medical officer receives, for instance, huge amount of money as salary, his counterpart in the teaching profession and on the same level, receives less. This situation still discourages many people from taken to teaching; even those who go through pure teachers’ training come out to embrace jobs in another field entirely.
It is hoped that the Buhari government would address comprehensively, the challenges that are facing the education sector, especially, the remuneration for teachers. This is the sure way of making his offer of teaching job to 500,000 graduates more attractive and exciting. [myad]
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