Open Letter to Governor El-Rufai

For a start, your educational revolution has, and, continues to spark controversies in various quarters. Sometimes back, the news of a large scale sack of teachers that failed the competency test dominated the public agenda, throwing forth various shades of opinion by stakeholders in the educational sector.  For me, the positives far outweigh the negatives. […]

For a start, your educational revolution has, and, continues to spark controversies in various quarters. Sometimes back, the news of a large scale sack of teachers that failed the competency test dominated the public agenda, throwing forth various shades of opinion by stakeholders in the educational sector. 

For me, the positives far outweigh the negatives. I do feel for the affected teachers that appear imminent to lose their jobs. I, however, feel happy for the students that have long bore the brunt of bad teaching. 

It is worthy to intimate that we are breeding and nurturing unacceptable standard of western education in the North. I personally cannot sacrifice the future of these kids on the premise of letting inept people stick to their jobs. It is about time able persons are deployed to save the system from tragic demise. When you educate a child, you contribute your quota to a nation’s development. Within this purview, you kill a nation by stifling the child from good education as incompetent students rarely affect the nation positively, both in terms of growth and development. So, yes, I do strongly believe there is no moral justifications for letting the teachers maintain their jobs in order to massage the unfruitful status quo.

The North is unequivocally backwards in western education. As a matter of truth, I honestly realised that our backwardness enjoys monopoly! The systemic rot stems from the primary level and spreads through to the secondary and, perhaps, a little bit beyond. The worst is the massive ineptitude grossly displayed by the teachers at the primary level. A little walk through the schools located in the rural parts of Kaduna state will leave you in tears. Unless, of course, you are not human. I was vehemently bewildered and reduced to a temporary state of coma when I stumbled across an SS3 student struggling to express himself in English language. 

I wake up every morning with thoughts of how on earth I can perform surgery on the brains of my students. I would so much as infuse an overdose of English language in their brains. I will for sure. At least, that way, my students would be shielded from the pillory they face in many encounters with their contemporaries in private schools to begin with. I was perplexed when they confessed to me that even English language was taught in Hausa at the primary level! What we have is a system on the brink of collapse. As such, I am not wholly surprised that those teachers truly failed the test. In my opinion, they deserve the axe however we intend to look at it. 

Tough decisions are sacrosanct if our educational sector is to be revived from its near state of necrosis. The first rule is, never minding whose ox is gored! Do I understand this because I had once attained a leadership position that warrants making tough decisions? I can’t say. What I know for sure is that those courageous calls ought to be made by someone that holds the buck. I am sure posterity will live to applaud you simply because you didn’t chicken out of your revolutionary train despite the opposition. 

Secondly, if our elders are as wise as theoretical underpinnings, then it is safe to draw the curtain with the saying that ‘’a stitch in time saves nine’’.

Ibrahim Yahaya, G.S.S. Jere, Kaduna State.