‘Nigeria has only 1.5m teachers’

What measures are you taking to regulate the teaching profession in Nigeria?

We are doing a lot of things to regulate the profession. We want to maintain standards and ensure that teachers teach appropriately. In doing this, we usually organise capacity building workshops to make sure they are current in whatever field they teach.

We are also interested in the conduct of the teachers; hence we established teaching investigation panels in each state of the federation. There is also a tribunal at the headquarters. The teachers must be good models to the students. To achieve this, any teacher found guilty of professional and ethical misconduct will be sanctioned by the tribunal after investigations. The panels will investigate the case, and if the teacher’s conduct is unacceptable, the report comes to the headquarters. The panel is made up of five professional teachers. One of them, who is not necessarily a teacher, must be a lawyer. The panel is sworn in by the chief judge of a state, and the attorney-general of the federation has a representative in the tribunal.

If an accused teacher wants to appeal against the verdict of the tribunal, he can only go to the Court of Appeal because the tribunal has a concurrent authority with the High Court. All these are part of regulations because when you talk of education, a teacher has to be practically and morally sound before he engages in the enterprise of learning. Registrar of the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria ( TRCN), Professor Addison Mark Wokocha, said one of the challenges facing the council is policy somersault in states, where unqualified teachers are employed. He also revealed that Nigeria has only 1.5 million qualified teachers, which is below the number needed in the country. university, the size should be smaller because at that level, teaching should be discussion or dialogue. In fact, teaching everywhere should not be a one-way directive. You are not giving orders to the students. I remember when I went to give a lecture at the National Defence College. As I was telling them about teaching, they told me that in their situation, they only obeyed orders. I said you could give orders in a war field or theater of operation, but in the classroom, you don’t give orders. Teaching is a dialogue. The teacher teaches and students listen and ask questions. Sometimes the student can even come up with new ideas from the same perspective, and he might be right. So, if you handle him like in the battle field you will fail. The same applies to the battlefields. The military instructor should listen to the soldiers because a soldier may know the war front better than the commander. By the time you obey the last order, you may go, and may not return.

The person you are teaching is a human being, and humans are not tabula-rasa or a clean slate. A child is an active processing organism capable of effective contribution in a learning-teaching transaction.

A Greek philosopher, Socrates, said the role of a teacher should be like that of a midwife or doctor that helps to deliver a child. Man is born with innate knowledge; therefore, dialogue will bring out what he knows. What you ask will lead to the realisation of what is in him. In fact, we don’t want teachers to force knowledge into the child. These days, the children know many things the teachers don’t know.

Is there any need for the review of the TRCN Act?

The Act is adequate. It says anybody found in a Nigerian classroom pretending to be a teacher should be prosecuted, and on conviction, two years imprisonment should be given to the employee and the employer. We would actually want to prosecute offenders, but before we do that, we have to start with awareness campaigns.

We have been encouraging those who are in the classroom without teaching qualifications to obtain teaching certificates or postgraduate diploma in education. We have already designed professional diploma in education, which is being run by five institutions. Those who obtain those certificates would see the difference in their performances. If you have a PhD in Mathematics without training in education, you are not a teacher; you are just a mathematician. It is when you have taken a teaching qualification and passed that you become a teacher.

Some of the teacher training institutions suffer inadequate learning facilities and cannot produce quality graduates; what is your take on that?

Let us not generalise. This is peculiar to every profession. The institutions are okay, they have been producing graduates, including teachers who have been doing well. After registering a person as a teacher, we re-certify him after every five years. We have a teacher continuous development programme which has just been presented to the public.

Do you have a comprehensive teacher register?

We have registered about 1.5 million teachers from preprimary to tertiary institutions. We go to every state to know how many teachers they have and how many are qualified. We publish them in the ‘statistical digest of registered teachers’ so that researchers can use them. It will enable parents too, to know schools to send their children.

What causes the delay in issuing certificates to registered teachers?

Our internet cyber recently crashed; otherwise as teachers pay for certification they are issued with certificates. However, the cyber is being restored.

Our name should have been teachers’ regulatory council so that it doesn’t seem as if the only work we do is registration. We do accreditation of courses in tertiary institutions and induct qualified graduates into the teaching profession. To avoid fake certificates, we decided to do the induction in various institutions as the students are graduated. These are major achievements because once you get qualified and wellmotivated teachers, the country will develop because education is key to development.

We are facing some challenges, one of which is policy somersault, where state governments approve the employment of unqualified teachers in their schools. Also, various governments have directed that youth corps members should teach in schools, unmindful of whether they are qualified or not.