World Teachers’ Day: Should Nigerian Teachers Be Involved In Celebration, Sober Reflection Or Both?

By Richardson Ogwezzy

World Teachers’ Day also known as International Teachers’ Day is always celebrated on the 5th of October every year. It is a day set aside like Children’s Day, Mother’s Day etc where teachers all over the world commemorate the anniversary of the adoption of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO recommendation concerning the status of teachers. It aims at focusing on assessing, appreciating and improving teachers across the world while also offering an opportunity to reflect on issues that have to do with teachers and the teaching career.

Teachers have earned for themselves innumerable sobriquet in relation to their contributions on global development. Teachers’ roles in global development stem from incontestable foundational and fundamental contributions of education to national development. And of course, no nation’s development has been adequately defined outside the matrices of her education. These critical roles of education in the historical existence of any nation explicate why there can never be any over-emphasis on the indispensability of teachers as the driving force of the goals of education.

In evaluating teachers’ performances, the involvement of all tiers of government as well as parents, students and stakeholders in education is both a priority and propriety. The combinations of all these efforts would make it much easier to objectively turn out reliable results on the teachers’ areas of weaknesses and strengths which would consequently enable the government and stakeholders in education to come up with several interventionist programmes and policies in furtherance of effective service delivery.

Specifically, from the available statistics, Nigeria teachers have comparatively been proved to be high-flyers in their job performances than other teachers all over the world over. This is in contradistinction to the largely inhumane and deplorable working conditions characteristic of the education sector in Nigeria. Such conditions include inadequate instructional facilities/infrastructure, over-crowded classrooms, poor school learning environment, poor instructional supervision, insecurity in schools and poor teachers remuneration among others.
Other insensitive factors Nigerian teachers defy to become pacesetters include but not limited to lack of political will to support education and government’s deliberate inability to fulfill promises and agreements reached with unions and stakeholders in the education sector. Teachers and all workers generally need to be appreciated to enable them exhibit unfettered commitment in their jobs. For the teachers, World Teachers’ Day affords stakeholders the opportunity to appreciate teachers’ commitments in the sector. For instance, in the 2020 World Teachers’ Day, His Excellency, President Muhammadu Buhari, President of Federal Republic of Nigeria, made promises to Nigerian teachers in the areas of conditions of service and also went a step further to announce the extension of teachers’ service years from 35 years to 40 years and in terms of age, from 60 years to 65 years. These extensions by Mr President are due to the fact that the more experienced teachers are in the field, the better and more pragmatic their outputs. This magnanimity which Mr. President showed to Nigeria teachers till date is yet to be implemented
Further inquiries on the non-implementation showed that such promises would necessarily require parliamentary action by the National Assembly. It is another World Teachers’ Day and such legislative action has not been mentioned in any quarters. If Mr. President had promised members of National Assembly a 10% increase on their sitting allowance, would they have received the same treatment of negligence? Why are teachers’ issues treated with unbridled insensitivity and ignominy?

Indubitably, the needless and avoidable bureaucratic bottlenecks that have delayed the implementation of Mr. President’s declaration one year after is a proven desideratum of the epileptic governance in Nigeria. In 2019 World Teachers’ Day, the governor of Delta State, His Excellency, Senator (Dr) Ifeanyi Okowa, rewarded twelve (12) teachers consisting of principals, head teachers and other classroom teachers with brand new cars and cash gifts. This gesture according to the governor is to recognise some of the outstanding teachers for their performances so as to give a boost to them while encouraging others to do more. He equally emphasised the need to demonstrate that teachers’ rewards would not only be in heaven but they should also reap from their labour while on earth.

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In furtherance of the governor’s appreciation of the teachers’ role in development, within the year he has established a world class Teachers’ Professional Development Centre (TPDC) in Delta State. I recommend that the teachers’ unions in the State reciprocate this first-of-its-kind action from the governor with a befitting and commensurate award.
World Teachers’ Day is here again, Delta State teachers are expectantly waiting for good news/packages from her teacher-friendly governor, in spite of his numerous attentions on teachers’ plight. This is because anywhere one frequently sees good things, becomes a spot for attention.

Let us stay briefly with some very disheartening and demoralising issues in Nigerian schools that are clogs in the wheel of teachers’ performances. They are insecurity right in the school environments as well as high level of indiscipline from the students with incredible parents’ support. For instance, in some Primary and Secondary Schools in various countries of the world, Nigeria in particular, there are incessant cases of students stabbing teachers to death, students stabbing students to death, mother stabbing her child’s teacher to death in presence of her students. Situations abound where parents go to the school and beat up teachers with so much impunity and even sue State Government on trivial and negligible disciplinary issues. Nigerian teachers now live a paranoic life in the course of discharging their duties.

Based on the foregoing, I think teachers of Primary and Secondary Schools, teachers’ unions such as Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), Academic Staff Union of Secondary Schools (ASUSS) should take a sober reflection and reflection on the 2021 World Teachers’ Day. The nuclei of such reflections should comprise government insensitivity to teachers’ rightful entitlements (especially working conditions), insecurity of lives of students and teachers, embarrassment from students’ parents, and other allied areas.
Rather than emphasis on ceremonial match past and the attendant jamborees, accompanied with wasteful eating and drinking, cerebral workshops and seminars could be organised to commemorate this special day. Beyond that, efforts should be made by executives of ASUSS and NUT to give awards or befitting recognition to some deserving State governors in the country for the countless sacrifices made in improving the teaching profession.

Nigerian teachers are waning in all areas of the career due to the inability of the unions to solidly stand and defend teachers’ right. The regrettable absence of inventiveness and innovations on contemporary best practices in the professions is also inhibitive of teachers’ career progress. For instance, NUT was founded in 1931, as the second union in Nigeria, with the aim of advancing and defending the rights of teachers, especially the agitation for improvements in working conditions. Presently in Nigeria, two respective unions exist in Primary and Secondary Schools, NUT and ASUSS, to advance those objectives.
However, observations have shown that these unions are not making any significant progress in the pursuit of those objectives. The lecturers in the tertiary institutions also have their unions which were formed later than the NUT. Today, members of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Senior Staff of Colleges of Education in Nigeria and Academic Staff Union Of Polytechnic (ASUP) are enjoying better remuneration, better working conditions and longer years of service. As they acquire more degrees, their salary grade levels increase.
On the contrary, some teachers in Primary and Secondary Schools have Master’s and Doctorate degrees yet without corresponding reflections on their salary grade levels. Furthering education by teachers at these wrongly perceived lower levels has also been seen as a waste of time and resources. Why have the unions not embarked on the worthy and rational demands of teachers benefiting from their higher qualifications? Is the time not ripe enough for the unions to think in that direction? Teachers in Primary Schools with first degrees up till now have not been allowed to get to level 16. It is only few States in Nigeria including Delta State, that allow holders of first degree to scarcely get to level 15 because of the rigid national policy which stipulates, albeit erroneously, that the highest academic qualification of a teacher in the Primary School is NCE.

The problems of teachers in Nigeria in recent times have been multifaceted, apart from government neglect of teachers’ welfare and conditions of service, there is also the self-inflicting degradation of the value of membership of the teachers’ unions as demonstrated in the legal tussle between the ASUSS and NUT on the questions of legality of the jurisdiction of one over the other. A chunk of the salaries received by teachers is spent on litigation as each teacher pays his or her dues into the coffers of the unions. Rather than spend such dues in the pursuit of better welfare, they waste them on court cases at the detriment of the teachers.

Recently in Delta State, the present administration created Ministries of Primary and Basic and Secondary Education to operate as separate ministries with their own Commissioners. Teachers in the State were even thinking this will give room to easy separation of ASUSS from the NUT thereby making the unions to exist independently of each other and then both will become focus on the fight for better welfare of their members; but the situation has remained the same.

One therefore begins to wonder, if being a teacher in Nigeria is a curse or blessing. So far, we have been engaged in an excursus into the myriad of challenges ignominiously confronting the Nigerian teachers. The reality and existentiality of those challenges is an exposé of the fact that on a World Teachers’ Day, in the midst of celebrations, there is the fundamental need for sober reflections on those challenges and how to practically overcome them. All stakeholders in the education sector should exit the plane of complaints on the poor quality of education and focus more on, among other areas, improving the much talked about working conditions of teachers. This consequentially will breed good quality education because such envisaged good quality education can only be birthed from good quality conditions of service of teachers. Let all stakeholders continue to reminisce on the fact that you can only give what you have.

Richardson Ogwezzy is a teacher at Girls’ Secondary School, Kwale, Delta State