Director-General of the National Teachers Institute, Kaduna, Aminu Sharehu, on Wednesday declared that over 80 per cent of primary school teachers in the North were not qualified to teach.
Sharehu stated this during a seminar entitled ‘Quality Assurance and Control in Teacher Education as a Tool for Achieving Millennium Development Goals’, held at the Federal College of Education, Zaria, Kaduna State.
The NTI boss, who noted that the reverse was the case in the South, however, linked the inadequacy in the North to several factors.
Sharehu, for instance, identified poor remuneration and lack of training as major handicaps to having competent teachers in the North.
He said, “Over 80 per cent of teachers in the North are not qualified because there is no motivation. You need to train and retrain teachers because National Certificate of Education is just a starting pointing.
“In the profession, we do not have learned people, but learning people because we believe that there is no end to learning.”
However, following Sharehu’s revelation, the Kaduna State Government has threatened to sack unqualified teachers in its pay roll.
The state Commissioner for Education, Alhaji Mohammed Shehu, who stated this, lamented that the majority of teachers in the state did not possess the NCE minimum qualification.
Shehu said, “As the
Commissioner for Education of Kaduna State, when I came on board, I discovered that 50 per cent of the teachers, particularly the primary schools were not qualified.
“There is no way they can do the job very well. I have to give them a period of five years within which to upgrade their qualifications and become NCE holders.
“There are teachers in Kaduna that for the past 20 years have never attended one education programme or the other. What do you think of such teachers?
“As a teacher, you need to attend one programme or the other to enhancing your capacity, scale up your knowledge, if you do not do that; you will be behind because the world is universally changing. We have to flush out close to 1,840 teachers within the system because of fake certificates.”
