4,500 Newly Recruited Teachers, Sacked by Kaduna Government for “Incompetence”

4,500 Newly Recruited Teachers, Sacked by Kaduna Government for “Incompetence”

4,500 teachers who made the recent list of 15,897 new teachers recruited in Kaduna State have been sacked by the Kaduna State Government.

Lawal Danjuma, an aide to the state’s commissioner of education who confirmed the sack of the newly recruited 4,500 teachers, just after 22,000 teachers were sacked for failing a primary 4-level competency test, they were fired for incompetence.

Lawal told BBC that the teachers were not able to write acceptance letters after they were given the job.

There is no place for teachers who don’t know how to write simple acceptance letters in our primary schools, sacking them is best for children’s education.

This is coming after the Governor of the State, Nasir El-Rufai disclosed that after the state sacked 21,780 teachers that “failed” a competency test it organised, some of the new ones were discovered to be unqualified.

El-Rufai who was speaking at a roundtable discussion on governance, organised in Abuja said the government began a recruitment process of another 25,000 teachers. But “even some of the new teachers we tried to recruit tried to game the system”, the governor said.

“We gave those that passed letters of appointments and a plain sheet of paper to write a simple letter of acceptance and some could not.

“It was clear they didn’t write the tests themselves.”

He said owing to the “strides” recorded by the state government in the education sector, private schools in Kaduna “are in trouble now.”

“All their teachers have now left to join our government,” he said, adding: “We believe that in five years’ time, private education in Kaduna will be a luxury, rather than a necessity.”

El-Rufai said his administration is determined to “fix the education system” in Kaduna and that “if it will cost us re-election, it is a price we are prepared to pay”.

In 2017 the governor of the Kaduna state released samples of the exam questions, thousands of basic school teachers failed after those teachers were sacked. The teachers failed the said exams they set for their own pupils. The primary school teachers could not pass exams meant for their six-year old pupils.  21,780 teachers, that’s almost two-thirds of the total number of teachers who sat the exams could not score 75% or higher.

The latest recruitment was to replace the thousands of teachers sacked at the time. Nigeria is struggling to deal with the poor pupil-teacher ratios across various states.