Why Niger teacher-corps were not paid salaries for five months

Five months after the recruitment of teacher-corps in Niger State, you are yet to start paying them salary. What is responsible for the delay?Those that are committed and resourceful will be paid. The scheme is actually voluntary but there is stipend for the volunteers at the end of every month. The stipend was initially planned […]

Five months after the recruitment of teacher-corps in Niger State, you are yet to start paying them salary. What is responsible for the delay?
Those that are committed and resourceful will be paid. The scheme is actually voluntary but there is stipend for the volunteers at the end of every month. The stipend was initially planned to be N20,000 but it had to be reviewed downward by the Board, because fund was not made available to us by the international donor partners. It is now N10,000 per teacher, instead of N20,000, and we have started paying them. The arrears will be paid in due course. In fact, the problem we had was as a result of election because there was no enough money so we were not rendering any service anywhere in Nigeria.
You said only those found to be diligent will benefit from the stipend. How many are found to be diligent?
In fact, less than 15% of them choose to remain at their duty posts, the rest abandoned their working places. We do the monitoring in remote villages to be sure that the recruits are doing exactly what they were assigned to do. We have only 75, out of 500, teachers-corps trained and we felt that if the 75 teachers can work, they will be able to create impact. In this kind of situation if a teacher absconded, what happens to the students? They suffer. This is not a charity organisation or a ministry where even if you don’t work, you still get your salary. This is an NGO, a non profit making organisation, where every single kobo spent is accounted for.
How many rural schools benefitted from the voluntary teachers-corps?
It was the ministry that posted them. I think they were posted to virtually all the schools in the remote areas. Not less than 300 rural secondary schools in Niger State benefitted from the scheme.
Are you into any agreement with the Niger State government in respect of the scheme?
No. Actually they promised to support us but we did not see anything. The support we are expecting from the state government is in terms of logistic, to be assisted with used vehicles because we use our cars to monitor these activities.
Most often than not, giving a training on ICT to the teachers is not the problem of teaches in the state but accessing the facilities. How do you intend to help in this regard?
Each teacher is supposed to own a computer. Therefore, Nigerian Union Teachers (NUT) and All Nigerian Conference of Principals of Secondary Schools (ANCOPSS) subscribed to it that each of their teachers should get the latest Zpad that has inbuilt e-learning facilities. It was agreed that the sum of N2,100 will be deducted from each teacher’s salary for a period of 10 months to enable them own a Zpad. However, the state government, under the immediate past administration, promised to subsidise the price of the Zpad for the teachers by 40% but that has not been paid yet. This setback has affected the pace at which the training is going.
What is your appeal to the state government?
I want to use this opportunity to call on the new government to create an office for coordinating the activities of NGOs. Look at the ICT training we are giving to the teachers in the state for free, if they were to be trained by a consulting firm it won’t be less than N50,000 per head.