The pathetic state of education in insurgency-ravaged Borno State was manifested in Malam-Fatori, Abadam Local Government Area of the state, where the state Governor, Prof. Babagana Zulum, faced terrible embarrassment after he discovered that majority of the students of a junior secondary school could not read.
Last Thursday, Zulum paid a surprise visit to the town’s Central Primary School Malam-Fatori, the headquarters of Abadam Local Government Area, located along the shores of Lake Chad in the northern part of the state.
During the visit, he carried out an aptitude test on about 100 students at the Junior Secondary School section of the school, but at the end of the test, the governor found out that 95 percent of the students admitted that they could not read. Only seven of the entire students said they could read.
He then asked each of the seven students to read from a textbook and to pronounce the phrase: “Social Studies” but five of the seven students pronounced it correctly while two failed.
The governor was deeply worried about the quality of teaching at the school, especially after he found out that of the 224 teachers on the payroll of schools in the LGA, only six were present during his visit, and none of them possessed the requisite teaching qualifications.
Zulum’s findings confirmed a report presented to him in February 2022, which assessed quality of primary school teachers across the 27 local government areas of Borno State.
The report had categorized Abadam as having the worst indices because out of 224 teachers assessed, only 14 were certified fit to teach in primary schools, and none of the 14 were at the school during the governor’s visit on Thursday.
The report said 70 out of 224 teachers across Abadam LGA were found trainable, while 140 were untrainable and, therefore, unqualified to teach.
At the end of his Malam-Fatori Central Primary Schools findings, Zulum directed that drastic measures should be taken to address the situation, which included the deployment of qualified teachers and the retraining of 70 teachers found to be trainable across the LGA.
He promised government support to encourage 70 teachers to return to colleges to acquire the required knowledge and teaching skills.
Meanwhile, after dealing with school assessment, the governor supervised the distribution of cash to 600 families (households) who had returned to Malam-Fatori for resettlement.
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