Niger Employs 30,981 Public School Teachers

 Laleye Dipo in Minna

A report by the Technical Committee on Teachers Head Count set up by the Niger State Government has revealed that there are not less than 30,981 teachers in the employment of the state government in public primary and secondary schools in the state.

This is even as the state has a total of 3,633 public primary and secondary schools.

The report, a copy of which was made available to THISDAY, indicated that 24,061 teachers are in the employment of the state government at the primary school and 6,870 teachers are engaged in the secondary schools.

According to the document, which was presented to the state Governor, Abubakar Sani Bello, at the Government House in Minna last week, only 19,358 teachers in the primary schools are qualified to teach in the institutions while 5,908 of those in the secondary schools are also qualified.

From the report, 4,703 primary school teachers were not qualified while 962 in secondary schools in the state are unqualified.

There are more male teachers in the primary and secondary school systems in the state with14, 049 against 10,012 females teachers in the primary schools and 4,047 male and 2,823 females in the secondary schools.

The Zone A, made up of the predominantly Nupe speaking people of the state, has the highest number of primary schools (1,351) as against Zones B and C comprising mostly the Gwari and Hausa speaking people (1010 and 774). Zone B has the largest number of teachers with 10,067 as against 8,977 for Zone A and 5017 for Zone C.

Similarly, Zone B tops with the number of qualified primary school  teachers with 8,673 as against 6,977 and 3,708 for Zones B and C respectively but Zone A has the highest number of unqualified teachers 2,000 as against 1,394 for Zone B, and 1,309 for Zone C.

In the secondary school section, Zone B has more schools than the two other zones with 193 institutions as against 182 for Zone A and 123 for Zone C, the zone also has more qualified teachers 3,555 as against 1,395 and 958 respectively of other zones.

The Principal Assistant Secretary of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), Niger State chapter, Garba Labaran, who presented the report on behalf of seven other members said to arrive at the statistics, the committee engaged the services of NUT branches across the state “as enumerators to collate teachers’ data through the use of effective data collection instrument,” adding that after the collection of the data, “the list was made available to all schools for teachers to verify/authenticate their information, and those that have claims/objections were given the opportunity to forward their claims.”

Labaran said: “This report will go a long way to guide the state and local governments in policy formulation, management and decision making towards determining some educational development indices such as planning, available number of teachers, recruitment, teachers’ salary, promotion, training and retraining.”

He also said the report would also serve as research instrument for educational planners, researchers and students, urging the government to sustain and review the exercise “every three years for effective educational planning and development in the state.”