By Oji Odu
Nigeria is celebrating this year’s World Teachers Day in fear and tears. Why? Two of the noble trainers of the society were, on Thursday, October 3, 2019, kidnapped from a private Secondary School, Engravers College, a boarding school which is located in a remote area near Kakau Daji village in Chikun Local Government Area (LGA) of Kaduna State. They also took away six female students of the school to an unknown destination.
The Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO) for Kaduna State Police Command, Yakubu Sabo, a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP),who confirmed the incident, said the incident was possible because of the porous fence of the school, assuring that the force was on the trail of the kidnappers.
“The gunmen invaded the school through a porous fence in the early hours of Thursday (yesterday) morning, went straight to the female hostel and abducted six students. Two teachers residing inside the school were also kidnapped by the bandits and their whereabouts are yet unknown.
“Information from the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) Toll Gate in the early hours of today (yesterday) at about 0310 hours indicated that some armed men gained entry into Engravers College, a boarding secondary school in a remote area near Kakau Daji village in Chikun Local Government Area (LGA) and took away two staff of the college and six female students to an unknown destination.
“On receipt of the information, the command immediately mobilised a team of anti-kidnapping, Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) and conventional police (officers) to the area for (a) possible rescue of the victims and arrest of the perpetrators. The IGP Intelligent Respond team (IRT) has been contacted for technical support,” he said.
Arguably the noblest profession among its peers of discipline in life, the United Nations (UN), in 1994, declared that October 5 of every year would be World Teachers Day (WTD) or International Teachers Day to celebrate teachers worldwide.
In UN’s 19 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the fourth goal – education- recognises teachers as key players to the achievement of the Education 2030 agenda.
The 2019 WTD has the theme: “Young Teachers: The future of the Profession.” This is aimed at proffering ideas to attract and keep young persons in the profession because of the desertion of young people from the profession.
According to the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 69 million new teachers are needed to provide quality universal primary and secondary education by 2030, which is the deadline for the new UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Magazine’s findings reveal that thousands of Nigerian teachers continue to work without the needed support and training to impart knowledge to students in this digital age.
The country’s huge school deficit is one of the great challenges of the country’s education. The resultant over-population in classes of most government-owned schools have continued to over -stretch teachers beyond their natural limit, thereby making nonsense of their huge contributions.
Taiwo Badejo, a teacher in one of Lagos State’s Primary schools, lamented to the Magazine that aside every other thing, the Nigerian teachers still have to grapple with poor conditions of service, lack of basic teaching aids and tools, unappreciated and poor funding.
“ Do we (teachers) look as healthy as those in other professions? We are an abandoned lot whose reward, many still believe, is in heaven. Who would like his child to be a teacher? Nobody. We are condemned to produce the best with the poorest facilities, dilapidated buildings and classrooms, as the authorities find it difficult to pay us the peanut salaries,” he said, rather dejectedly.
Kenneth Okafor, an educationist, in a chat with the Magazine expressed displeasure that the noble teaching profession has become a dumping ground for non- trained people who are not able to get employment in their field of study. This accounts for the misnomers we get among those teachers, and the name of the teaching profession is soiled.
“ Teachers are real care-givers, parents of the children they teach. They are ready to defend them, as they also suffer the students’ fate like the recent kidnap of two teachers and six female students from a Kaduna school.
“ How many teachers have been abducted and, sometimes, killed in recent times? According to a UN 2018 data, 2,295 teachers have been killed since the insurgency in the North-east, a number which has continued to increase. This is not to say there are no bad eggs among them.
“These are the all comers that I described who have nothing to do as teachers. They can do anything to make money, like the recent case in one of the schools in the East where a female teacher faked her kidnap to extort about N500,000 from her relatives. Unfortunately, it backfired,” he added.
