THE CHAIRMAN, House of Representatives Committee on University Education, Hon. Abubakar Fulata, has called for salary increment for primary, secondary and university teachers.
The chairman said the teachers should earn N250,000, N500,000 and N1 million respectively as monthly renumeration.
Fulata was speaking at a One-Day National Stakeholders’ Workshop on the Development of a Roadmap for the Nigerian Education Sector (2023-2027), in Abuja on Thursday.
Fulata said that it is important for Nigerian teachers to be more encouraged by paying them adequately to teach the children.
He also stressed the need to translate all subject textbooks into local languages so as to catch up with the world.
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According to him, efforts have been made by past administrations as regards the country’s education but those efforts had not yielded the desired results.
“It is a thing of concern that from decades, several efforts on policies made by successive government to resuscitate and improve the education sector and those efforts have continued to create very little progress.
“All over the world, the subject of language of instruction has always been local language of those countries. If you go to the UK, education is taught in English, if you go to France, education from the basic level up to the tertiary level is taught in French.
“It is in Nigeria that you teach language of instruction in English. Our problem has always been that we are teaching our children subjects they ought to have been taught in their local language.
“All Mathematical, Physics, Chemistry textbook and what have you should be in our local languages. There is no way we can catch up with the world if we continue teaching our children in a foreign language.
“No primary school teacher should earn less than N250,000 in a month, no secondary school teacher should earn less than N500,000 and no university teacher should warn less than 1million in a month.
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“The nation must declare a state of emergency in education. We must commit at least 25 per cent to 30 per cent of our national budget to education.
“It is high time we pay them adequately so that them can teach our children,” he said.
The Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, said that the ministry has great policies on papers but they are not meeting the needs of the people.
Mamman explained that the country’s education does not translate to the needs of the society, hence the need to critically have a roadmap that would translate to development.
He added that those roadmaps must however be implemented within the shortest timeline.
“President Bola Tinubu has charged the ministry to do all it can to reposition the sector.
“We have problems that has been militating the visions, missions and objectives on ground. We have great and fantastic policies but the issue is that our people are not seeing our problems addressed.
“We have institutions churning out graduates who are not employable and we cannot go on like this forever.
“So, in line with our President’s mandate, we must have a roadmap to guide the implementation of how to take the sector forward.
“The idea of the conference is to have a whole lot of time for implementation of our policies,” he said.
He charged participants to work within limited time so that Nigerians could begin to feel the impacts of the policies made within the timelines.
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He pledged to engage state governments on the ministry’s crusade to move the sector forward.
In the same vein, the Minister of State for Education, Dr Yusuf Sununu, emphasised the need to recognise gender mainstreaming in the roadmap so that Nigeria will have the benefit of a balanced education system.
“Education, you would all agree is one sector of development that Nigerians have been known to speak with one voice in terms of its importance to development.
“However, this recognition of its importance is yet to translate to tangible results that show that an educated person stands a better chance of living a fulfilled life.
“This disconnect, between purpose and reality, could be said to be responsible for inadequate attention to the sector, wrong perceptions of the relative importance of the different forms and types of education.
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“Indeed, I must also say that the inability of our youths to gain employment after going through the rigors of academic may be responsible for a gradually building dis-interest in the pursuit of education,” he said. Sununu, however, said this trend must be curtailed to make Nigerian education responsive to every day realities and beneficial to the individual as well as the nation. (NAN)
