Edo invites 1,300 teachers to defend certificates

Edo State Government has invited 1,300 primary school teachers with irregularities in their education certificates and age records to appear before a verification committee to defend themselves.

This was made known during a meeting of the state Govenor, Adams Oshiomhole with the leadership of the state chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) led by Mr Emmanuel Ademokun and the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) led by Mr Patrick Ikosimi.
The governor, who said the exercise was not to witch-hunt anybody, however, insisted that it would not be business as usual and that those who had become too old to teach would have to go.

Oshiomhole said: “it is not my wish to preside over dismissals, first, it is not cheap.  Secondly, I have a responsibility to keep Edo going and ensure that our children are in good hands of teachers, who are not senile and also still strong to stand and competent to teach.
“If the facts reveal that there are teachers in the classrooms who do not have the requisite qualification, you cannot insist that they remain in the system.
“The good news is that those who are not too old, who are capable of being trained will remain. If we find that some are deficient and it is possible for them to benefit from training, we will give them training, what is not acceptable is to say it is business as usual,” he noted.

The governor argued “we can mismanage everything in our country, if you mismanage education, you are killing our tomorrow, our collective future.  The roads we are building, we won’t have brains to look over them.  In the absence of brains, we won’t have growth and development.
“I have asked the Ministry of Education to invite those category of teachers, whose number is about 1,300, who, from the records appear to have started their primary school before they were born to come and speak to the fact because we are not assuming that those documents are iron-cast.”
He said the primary school teachers would be paid their  salary, which was withheld while they embarked on strike, having agreed to cover the lost ground.
Recall that the governor had, at a Town Hall meeting on education in the state on July 31 said an audit carried out by the state Information and Communications Technology unit showed that 789 teachers out of 1,379 obtained their Primary School Leaving Certificates before the age of 8 or 9.

He said at the meeting that “some of the records show that there were a few who were particularly gifted and they finished primary school before they were born.
“We found that of all our Primary School Teachers, only 1,287 representing 9% out of 14,484 teachers have proper and accurate records in our system.”
91% have various forms of discrepancies in their records.
Oshiomhole said “about 1,379 teachers representing 11.5% claim that they obtained their Primary School Certificates after they had been employed as teachers.  In fact, some obtained their Primary School Certificates not more than two years ago, from the school in which they were employed as teachers.”