The Presidency and the Office of the Vice President lack the expertise to oversee proposed recruitment of 500,000 teachers and should therefore hand the job over to the Ministry of Education.

The chairman, Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Senator Jubrin Barau, made this demand in Abuja, yesterday.

“Tell the Vice President that you are not taking his power but that the ministry is the right place to handle the recruitment. Tell him the Senate and the House of Representatives have agreed that the project be domiciled in the ministry,” Barau told Minister of Education Mallam Adamu Adamu.

“I will pass your request to the Vice President,” Adamu replied. Barau was speaking at the 61st meeting of the National Council on Education (NCE). The Council is the highest decision-making body on education in Nigeria, and is chaired by the Minister of Education.

The senator said, if the ministry was not allowed to handle the process, oversight and evaluation would be difficult. He noted that as beautiful as the objective was, the result might fall below expectation because the office of the Vice President lacked the technical know-how to handle the task.

Barau also urged the ministry to pay more attention to providing technical education, saying it would boost self-reliance among Nigerians. The minister, in his remark told the Council, made up of Commissioners of Education from all the states, that his strategic plan at repositioning the education sector would focus on improving teacher quality.

He said: “For teacher quality to be guaranteed, the following strategies must be considered: improving the quality of those seeking to enter the teaching profession; raising the quality of education and training received through initial education courses; continuing to develop the professional skills of teachers; and promoting, recognising and training effective teachers, while seeking to remove ineffective ones.”

He added: “I urge you to consider making the study of Christian Religious Knowledge compulsory for Christian students, and the study of Islamic Religious knowledge compulsory for Muslim students, at least up to the end of senior secondary school.”

•Text courtesy of The Guardian. Photo shows Senator Jubrin Barau.

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