The Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, has condemned President Muhammadu Buhari’s support for the Kaduna State Government’s planned sacking of about 22,000 teachers that failed competency test conducted by the government.
The governor said by openly supporting the planned sacking of about 22,000 teachers in Kaduna State, the President had approved loss of jobs as the official policy of the All Progressives Congress instead of creating three million jobs per year that the party promised Nigerians.
In a statement issued in Ado Ekiti on Tuesday and signed by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, Fayose reiterated his total commitment to the welfare of workers in Ekiti State.
“Not minding the state’s inability to pay salaries as and when due, owing to paucity of fund, I will not sack any worker under any guise,” he said.
The governor said it was sad that Buhari whose government promised to create jobs for Nigerians was supporting the move to throw 22,000 teachers into the labour market after causing loss of millions of jobs in the private sector and collapse of several companies.
According to him, the President’s position was a pointer that labour leaders in the country should prepare for mass sacking of workers by the APC governments both at the federal and state levels.
Fayose said, “Here in Ekiti State, the immediate past APC government used competency test to demote many secondary school principals, vice-principals and primary school headteachers, leading to sudden death of many of them. The government then tried to force the competency test on the teachers but they resisted.
“Today, students in Ekiti State are still being taught by the same teachers that the APC government said were not competent and the students were the ones whose performance gave the state first position in NECO in 2016 and 2017.
“The state also moved from 26 per cent performance in the West African Examination Council’s Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination in 2014 to 36.5 per cent in 2015, 42 per cent in 2016 and 74.86 per cent in 2017.”
While declaring that it was not the right of any state government to set exams for teachers, Fayose argued that the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria was set up for the purpose of regulating the teaching profession in Nigeria.
“Therefore, instead of hiding under competency test to sack teachers, the APC government both at the states and federal governments should come to Ekiti State and learn how we were able to get optimum performance from the same set of teachers that the immediate past APC government in the state labelled incompetent and harassed with competency test,” he added.
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