The Odemwinge in every Nigerian school When Edo State governor, Adams Oshiomhole, paid an unscheduled visit to the State Staff Training Centre, venue of a recent screening exercise organised by the state government in conjunction with the state’s Nigeria Union of Teachers and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), he met more than he had probably bargained for. At the exercise, convened to verify the educational credentials and age records of the state’s teachers, the governor had a chastening encounter with Mrs Augusta Odemwinge, currently on the teaching staff of Asologun Primary School, Ikpoba, in Okha Local Government Area of the state. Mrs Augusta’s task could not have been simpler. She was to read from an affidavit she had tendered in support of her credentials. But the primary school teacher found the task too onerous, stumbling from one word to another, and never once managing to put an intelligible sentence together. After nearly thirteen minutes of polite, if irritated prodding, the governor had to give up, asking with barely disguised annoyance: “If you can’t read, what do you teach the pupils? What do you write on the board?” In the aftermath of Mrs Odemwinge’s cringe-inducing performance, other stakeholders have piled on. Patrick Ikosimi, the state chairman of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), was quick to declare her failure to navigate a simple affidavit “an embarrassment,” adding that “what this teacher has just displayed is a show of shame; it shows the decadence in the education sector.” Predictably, footage of the performance has also gone viral, sparking widespread disbelief and anger about the state of the education sector in the country. For this newspaper, the incident raises two sets of issues. The first has to do with Edo State itself, in particular the modalities for the recruitment, monitoring and training of teachers, both at the primary and secondary levels. One thing that is obvious from Mrs Odemwinge’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to read an affidavit she had presumably sworn to is that she has unresolved issues with the basic rules of grammar. How was she recruited in the first place? This is a question that those in charge of recruitment of teachers for the state must answer. The irony here is that it is the same government that, through negligence or collusion, made her recruitment possible that is now outing her for her incompetence. Mrs Odemwinge is clearly unfit to teach. But so are thousands of other Edo State teachers who, according to the state government, have managed to earn teaching appointments with dubious credentials. Who recruited those illiterate teachers? If the Edo State government is serious about cleaning up education in the state, it must go after those who make the Mrs Odemwinges of this world possible. But the bitter truth about Mrs Odemwinge is that she is hardly alone, or even in the minority, and this is the peg for the second set of issues raised by the incident. The crux of the matter is that her like is to be found in the majority of schools across the country. This is hardly a profound discovery. Instead, it is a logical upshot of decades of neglect of the education sector. Most teachers in public schools in Nigeria today are poorly trained and lacking in motivation. They feel unappreciated because, among other things, the message they get from office holders and the larger consumerist culture is that their labour is worthless. The ongoing ASUU strike is proof that the problem of demotivation among teachers is found at every level of the education sector. The screening exercise by the Edo State government is a worthwhile exercise, and every Odemwinge that is outed is a significant step towards a responsible and accountable education system. But what is really at issue is beyond Mrs Odemwinge and Edo State, and cannot be solved even with the kind of public theater in which Governor Oshiomhole and his employee were involved. The entire Nigerian education system is in dire straits, and rescue work must begin post-haste.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 12:40:32 +0000
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