By Augustine Kuza Lafia
Governor Abdullahi Sule of Nasarawa state has given reasons why his administration will not employ the teachers employed by the suspended chairman of the Nasarawa State Teachers Service Commission (TSC).
Governor Sule made this known when he hosted a coalition of denominations under the aegis of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) on a thank-you visit at the government house.
Responding to the request by the Nasarawa State Chairman of CAN, Very Reverend Dr Sunday Emma for his administration to absorb all those employed by the TSC, the Governor said that will not be possible because most of them lack the requisite qualifications to teach.
“You are asking me to absorb them. Reverend, look at it two ways. I am not saying that I want to cause some people problems. I was told some of these people who paid money are not even qualified to teach. I was told some of them have given as much as 700, 600 thousand naira. These are people who would be paid less than 100, 000.
“I was told 80 percent of them could not even write an acceptance letter, if you are the Governor Sir, and you are being told all these. If we are helping them, we are not helping our educational system. That means we can completely forget about our desire to reform the educational system,” he stated.
He explained that on coming into office in 2019, he commissioned some educationists to carry out a baseline survey of schools across the state after which they reported on the deplorable condition of the educational sector of the state.
“They came back and said they needed buildings, we have done that, they needed curriculum, we have done that, amongst others. They also said we needed teachers. They said let us start with 1000 teachers. So we gave the approval for the employment of 1000 teachers,” he said.
He added that he gave approval for the TSC to recruit only 1000 teachers but went ahead to employ more than 1000 additional teachers.
“They brought me among the 1000, 50 slots because they know there are a lot of people that would approach me to ask for slots. I said no, don’t give me any fifty. Go ahead and employ all of them based on merit. I don’t even one a single slot; the reason being because our educational system in the state is grossly decayed and we need to bring it up. If we don’t have qualified teachers, if we employ teachers based on this-one-knows-this-one, we may not have the kind of good teachers that we are looking for,” he noted.
Governor Sule decried the fact that most of those employed by the TSC even refused to be posted out to the hinterlands but instead chose to remain in urban centres, to the detriment of the population in the rural areas.
