Educationally Disadvantaged: Kebbi Recruits 2000 New Teachers

Attempts to change the narrative as being educationally disadvantaged, has prompted the Kebbi State government to commence recruitment of an additional 2000 teachers.

The move, according to the state Commissioner for Education, Mohammed Aliero is expected to bridge teaching gap at the basic education level.

The information came to the fore on Friday, on the sidelines of a two-day media dialogue organised by United Nations Education Fund (UNICEF) on Cash Transfer Programme in selected states of Northern Nigeria.

Kebbi is regarded as one of the states with the highest number of out-of-school children in the country, but UNICEF, through its Educate-A- Child (EAC) programme, is targeting over 501,749 out-of-school children in four Northern states with the highest number of such children.

Beyond the recruitment exercise, the state spends approximately N280 million, monthly implementing the school feeding programme, a concept that is geared towards boosting school enrolment at the basic level.

According to Aliero, previous administrations in the state never paid attention to educational development, where over 80 percent of the student population sits on the floor in dilapidated buildings.

He said, “Throughout this month, I have been touring some local governments because we are recruiting about 2000 teaching staff.

“I went to all the headquarters and we have finished the recruitment of the teachers. We will start giving them offer letter by this new week, we designed a very nice recruitment format, whereby automatic offers will be given to anyone who made A,” he said.

He explained that these reforms had to be implemented in the state school system because they found out that existing teaching personnel were not delivering knowledge as expected of them, owing to their personal handicap.

His words, “Most of these university graduates are not qualified to teach, there was a time I brought a graduate here and asked him to define economics, he could not.

“We had to sit down with our local colleagues in the university. Infact, in Argungun we had to call an official to sit down with us at the interview session.

“We also discovered that none of the students could write a correct sentence in English yet this particular teacher boasted of having double major, including shorthand.

“When I came on board, out of about 67 boarding schools and 123 day schools and about 107 junior secondary schools, I toured round to see what was going on”.