The Method in el-Rufai’s

At an “Education for all is responsibility of all” summit on 14th February 2013, the then Kaduna State Commissioner for Education, Alhaji Usman Mohammed shocked his audience by disclosing that of a total of 1,599 teachers selected from across the state who were given primary four tests in Mathematics and Basic literacy; only one of them scored 75 percent, 251 scored between 50 to 75 percent and 1,300 scored below 25 percent. When the same examination was conducted for 1,800 primary school pupils, according to Mohammed, most of them failed woefully. “We are not surprised about the performance of the pupils because how can they know it, when their teachers don’t,” he said.

The implication of only 251 out of 1,599 teachers scoring above 50 percent means that a mere 15.7 percent of those tested passed. That 1,300 out of 1,599 teachers scored below 25 percent also implies that 81.3 percent of the teachers tested performed woefully in an examination meant for Primary Four pupils. Unfortunately, while the then governor, Alhaji Mukhtar Ramalan Yero, may have properly diagnosed the problem, there is no evidence that his administration took any action against the teachers who were certified illiterates.

Incidentally, just three months earlier, on 10th November 2012, Yero’s immediate predecessor, the late Governor Patrick Yakowa had disclosed that a verification exercise carried out in the state revealed that no fewer than 2,000 teachers secured their appointments with fake certificates. While he did not disclose what happened to those teachers, Yakowa said memorably: “Teacher quality dictates the success of any educational pursuits… and no nation rises above the quality of its teachers.”

I have highlighted the foregoing to show that the problem of illiterate teachers in Kaduna State predates the era of Governor Nasir el-Rufai and he is not even the first to have conducted a test of their suitability. The difference is that el-Rufai has decided to confront the illiterate teachers who, aside the support of a powerful union, may also be taking advantage of the complicated politics of Kaduna State to fight back.

However, before we go to the kernel of the issue, it is important to reiterate that this is not a problem peculiar only to Kaduna. On 26th May 2012, the then Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Mr Mohammed Modibbo lamented about the quality of teachers in most of our public schools, after which he zeroed in on Sokoto State when members of the Senate Education Committee visited his office: “More than 50 per cent of the entire teachers in Sokoto State cannot read because they are unqualified. So how can they read the UBE books we sent to them? How would they be able to teach the children how to read?”

While I am well aware of the efforts Governor Aminu Tambuwal has been making in the last two and a half years to change that sordid narrative and the dramatic el- Rufai

improvement he has recorded as a result, the point remains that we cannot continue to live in denial about a systemic problem that is national. When my friend, Bolaji Abdullahi, as Education Commissioner in Kwara State, conducted the same primary four test for 19,125 teachers in 2008, not only did majority fail, 259 actually scored zero. But, as I said earlier, the problem is not restricted to any state or zone, it is national.

On 15th November 2012, the then Education and Technology Commissioner in Ogun State, Mr Segun Odubela said that following a verification exercise conducted by a team of consultants, about 6,000, representing 31 percent of 19,146 teachers in the state, were found to be unqualified while another 800 entered the service with forged certificates; including the case of a teacher “who would have commenced primary school four years before his birth”. In 2009, Oyo State conducted an oral assessment exercise for teachers in the state public schools where it was discovered that accounts teachers couldn’t define Payee and social studies teachers didn’t know the meaning of UNESCO.

Personally, I came face to face with this problem in the course of my two-year stint as a member of the panel of assessors for the Nigerian Brewery Plc in their annual Teacher of the Year Award. My 15th October 2015 piece titled “Teaching Computer on Chalkboard” tells a compelling story of the tragedy of our education sector and the challenge of the teaching profession in Nigeria today.

Unfortunately, those who have attempted a radical approach to deal with the problem have been subdued by labour unions. A classic example was what happened in Ekiti State in June 2012 when both the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Academic Staff Union of Secondary Schools (ASUSS) directed their members to stay away from the Teachers Development Needs Assessment (TDNA) test organised by the administration of then Governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi. In the end, those illiterate teachers were able to morph into the opposition that eventually