THE Registrar, Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), Josiah Ajiboye says Nigeria needs as much as 250,000 teachers annually to be able to address teachers’ deficit in the primary and post-primary schools.
“Some teachers are leaving the profession; some are retiring and are not being replaced. We need about 250,000 teachers annually because we have a shortage of teachers. The insurgency in the Northeast has made the situation critical,” Ajiboye said in Abuja on Thursday.
In April, on the eve of the 4th year anniversary of the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Chobok, Borno State, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said at least 2,295 teachers had been killed in the North-east since the conflict started in 2009.
A total of 1,400 schools were also destroyed by the terrorists since 2013.
The TRCN disclosed that Nigeria currently has over two million qualified and registered teachers in its public and private primary and post-primary schools.
He said the Council registered more than 500,000 qualified teachers since 2016 as part of efforts to eliminate quackery in the teaching profession.
“Within the period that I have been in the saddle, over 500,000 teachers have been registered within the period of two years, because before I came, they registered just over one million but about now, we have close to two million teachers that have been registered.
He said teachers who do not have the basic qualification requirement for teaching, which according to him remains the Nigerian Certificate in Education (NCE), have till December 2019 to get the necessary qualification and come forward for registration by TRCN.
Ajiboye explained that the National Council on Education which is the highest decision-making body on education has ratified the deadline at its meeting held in 2017 in Kano.
“The Council had taken a position a long time ago and it was reaffirmed at its Kano meeting in 2017 that anybody that is not qualified, not registered and licenced by TRCN by December 2019 would not be allowed in a classroom.
“The moratorium period was two years and we now have a year to go. By January 2020, we will begin to do enforcement and remove them from our classrooms,” he said.
The TRCN, he added would start the elimination of unregistered teachers from the profession in 2020 using six states as a pilot study.
The states are Nasarawa State for North Central, Ogun for South West, Ebonyi for South East, Cross River for South South, Jigawa for North West and Bauchi for North East.
“We have the list, we have the database of those who are qualified and those who are in school teaching but not qualified. It is going to be a continuous exercise. We will cascade to the rest of the country and route out those who are not qualified from the profession,” he said.