FG to employ 1.3m teachers

Despite its plan to recruit 500,000 teachers, the Federal Government on Tuesday, said it has been confronted with the acute shortage of qualified teachers for basic education in the country. The government said Nigeria needed to employ about 1.3 million fresh teachers in the next six years to be able to address the lapses. Speaking at the national flag-off of Teacher Development Training, under the Universal Basic Education Commission programme in Abuja, Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, said government was concerned about the quality of teachers, the wide gap between the number of teachers required and current number of teachers available in the basic education sector. The Minister said, “In Nigeria, we need about 1.3 million teachers in the next six years. We are in no doubt, that without professional and qualitative teachers, the dream of building a globally competitive and development- oriented education system that instils and imbues the requisite skills and knowhow to our terming younger generation would continue to be a pipe-dream. “The availability of qualified and competent teachers, their continuous training and retraining would have to be emphasised to complement other inputs in order to come up with quality basic education achievements.” According to him, in addition to the 1.3 million teachers, the Federal Government was still working to recruit and inject 500,000 teachers into basic education sector across the county. Adamu added that on completion of the recruitment of the proposed 500,000 teachers, “this would place more responsibilities and higher expectations on states and local governments in terms of the roles they would be playing in providing more teacher infrastructure and instructional materials.” SOURCE: Friday Olokor