By Rita Iliya
Minna – The Niger chapter of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) has called on the state government to employ more teachers and deploy a bulk of them to the rural schools.
“Many schools in the state do not have teachers. The situation is worse in the rural areas. Government should employ more teachers to replace those that have died, resigned or retired.
“A bulk of those employed should be posted to the rural areas because the situation there is particularly bad,” Malam Labaran Garba, Secretary of the union, said on Tuesday in Minna.
Garba told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that effective service delivery and quality education craved by the state government was only possible with enough teachers to meet the demand.
He wondered why government had not filled the vacuum left by teachers that had exited the system.
“The situation has constituted a major problem. We have a rising number of children seeking education, but we are faced with a dwindling number of teachers. This imbalance is not good for any meaningful growth,” he said.
Garba said that good teachers were the main pillar of any educational system, and advised government against playing with the future of children whose only hope in life depended on acquiring good basic education.
He particularly decried a situation where teachers were forced to handle up to four subjects, saying that it had hampered quality delivery.
The NUT official advised government to adopt stringent measures toward monitoring teachers in rural schools so as to check truancy and poor delivery.
He called for more instructional materials in rural schools to improve teaching and learning, and appealed to government to review the salaries of teachers to boost their morale.