BEVERLY HILLS, November 14, (THEWILL) – The Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, has slammed President Muhammadu Buhari for supporting the Kaduna State Government on its planned sacking of about 22,000 teachers that failed competency test conducted by the government.
The Governor, in a statement issued in Ado Ekiti on Tuesday by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, said the President had approved loss of jobs as the official policy of the All Progressives Congress (APC) instead of creating three million jobs per year that the party promised Nigerians.
He declared that it was not the duty of any state government to set exams for teachers arguing that the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria was set up for the purpose of regulating the teaching profession in Nigeria.
“Not minding the state’s inability to pay salaries as and when due, owing to paucity of fund, I will not sack any worker under any guise,” the statement read.
“Here in Ekiti State, the immediate past APC government used competency test to demote many secondary school principals, vice-principals and primary school head teachers, leading to sudden death of many of them. The government then tried to force the competency test on the teachers but they resisted.
“Today, students in Ekiti State are still being taught by the same teachers that the APC government said were not competent and the students were the ones whose performance gave the state first position in NECO in 2016 and 2017.
“The state also moved from 26 per cent performance in the West African Examination Council’s Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination in 2014 to 36.5 per cent in 2015, 42 per cent in 2016 and 74.86 per cent in 2017.”
“Therefore, instead of hiding under competency test to sack teachers, the APC government both at the states and federal governments should come to Ekiti State and learn how we were able to get optimum performance from the same set of teachers that the immediate past APC government in the state labelled incompetent and harassed with competency test.”
However, the Kaduna state Governor, Nasir El- Rufai has responded to Fayose.
El-Rufai, on a post on twitter, felt Fayose was missing out something, and so he decided to ‘educate’ him.
“Your Excellency Sir, we are not sacking teachers in Kaduna. Rather, we are replacing unqualified people who are unfit to be called teachers to save the future of the next generation,” he wrote.
About the Author
