An Edo governorship aspirant on Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) platform, Anslem Ojezua, has promised to prioritise education by reviving the defunct Teachers Training College (TTC) system to fill the vacuum in the educational system and solve the problem of dearth of teachers in the state.
He also promised his administration would improve the healthcare delivery system of the state by providing good incentives to personnel of the system.
The former commissioner for Information under the government of former governor Adams Oshiomhole, and immediate past state chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC), who defected with Governor Godwin Obaseki to PDP, made the promise during an interactive section with members of the Correspondent Chapel of the Edo State Council of Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), at the chapel’s secretariat in Benin.
Acknowledging that Governor Obaseki’s administration had laid a solid foundation for the educational growth of the state, Ojezua said shortage of teachers in the state needed to be addressed so that the gains of the present administration in that sector could be sustained, pointing out that emphasis needed to be paid to the fundamental level of education.
He said to address the problem, attention must shift to the issue of TTC which, he regretted, was abolished with the introduction of the National Certificate on Education (NCE), as the basic requirement to teach at the primary school level.
The governorship aspirant said the problem with the policy on NCE as against the old TTC, was that the NCE limited the number of subjects a teacher with that qualification could teach, whereas “a teacher is trained to teach as many subjects as are offered in the class where he or she is the class teacher.
“I am very concerned about education, particularly at the fundamental level, because we have enough schools, but not enough teachers. In most cases, it can be traced to the fact that it looks like the state does not have the capacity to pay for the number of teachers that are required, but we will have to look for a way to do it, that is, find a solution.
How do we get more teachers at a lesser cost? How do we involve our communities, so that our children can have access to good education? Because without education a lot of us will not be sitting here, not you, not me. And with education, there is nothing we cannot achieve. “We don’t have to inherit anything, because I believe for a rich man’s son to sell an inherited house, there is a poor man’s son to buy. And the only reason he has to do so is because he has acquired education, and that education is the one creating wealth for him.
“So, education is one area I am passionate about. One way I will look at it is that the government came up with a policy that you need a minimum of NCE to be able to teach in government schools. And the way they interpreted it, it looks like an NCE teacher will only teach one subject, but growing up, we were used to teachers who taught all subjects. What stops a teacher, who has gone through NCE and was taught how to teach all subjects or who may not have gone to NCE to go and acquire an NCE and come and teach all subjects.
“That way, instead of 10 teachers, one teacher can just take all the subjects and reduce the bills. What makes it difficult I think is that in an attempt to implement that policy, they abrogated TTC being the primary level to feed the college of education. Then, they used the regular secondary school to feed the colleges of education. And these things have made the teachers to lose the essential part of their training; learning how to teach, because in those days, we used to have all round classroom administrators, and teachers for special subjects like Mathematics and Physics going round, but each teacher is supposed to take care of his class, that is not the case anymore. I think that is an area we think we will revisit. If we do that, I think we will have enough teachers. I know there is a federal policy on that. But the most important thing is the education of our children no matter what they say in Abuja. I don’t think it is an offence to do things differently,” he said.
Ojezua bemoaned what he termed the unbelievably high cost of access to health care, saying if that was not addressed adequately, it would spell doom for the majority of the people.