Kuni Tyessi in Abuja
The Kebbi State government has lamented the spate of unqualified teachers in the state, and has disclosed that most graduates in the state lack the skills needed in teaching and has therefore approved the recruitment of 2000 more teachers into the system.
The commissioner for education, Muhammad Aliero, who disclosed this in an interview, said several of the graduates and teachers in waiting cannot speak English and cannot write correct sentences in English despite having double honours.
While commending the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) alongside Educate A Child (EAC), for their support towards education through the Cash Transfer Programme (CTP), the commissioner said the state government has put mechanisms in place to take over the programme when it runs full cycle.
He said: “Most of these university graduates are not qualified to teach. There was a time I brought a graduate here, he could not define economics.
“We have finished the recruitment of 2000. We designed a very nice format where we will give automatic offer to anyone who made ‘A’.
“We have to sit down with our local colleagues in the university. In fact, in Argungu, we had to call the official to sit down at the interview place to see what we are seeing. None of the students could write a correct sentence in English and he said he had double major including Shorthand.
“It is appalling. For me, when I came on board, out of about 67 boarding schools and 123 day schools and about 107 junior secondary schools, I went there myself to see what was going on. And when I got there, I made sure that everything went well. And we had about 17 courses.”
He said to make the state one of the lowest in the occurrence of out-of school children, 40 nomadic schools have been built while 504 almajiri Islamic schools have been identified and mathematics and English will be taught in the schools for proper harmonisation.
“All hands are on deck to make sure that we continue with the programme. I think I told you that Kebbi state spends N280 million on feeding. We have built 40 nomadic schools.
“We have identified 504 almajiri Islamic schools. We will make necessary renovation for them and we’ll make sure that we send mathematics and English teachers to them.
When we do that, by 2020, our volume of out-of- school will be very low and depleted. We will be the least in the north.”
