Monday, 5th October, 2015 was this year’s anniversary of World Teachers’ Day (WTD), a day specially reserved to honour the contributions of teaching professionals all over the world in the development of human capital.
In a letter jointly issued to mark this year’s edition, the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), International Labour Organisation (ILO), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Education International (EI) stated: “today, as the global community comes together to support the new 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals, that central role has never been more significant.”
They called for inclusive and equitable quality education and the promotion of lifelong learning opportunities for all. They called for the improvement of the quality of teachers and the conditions under which they work, using universally recommended benchmarks, adding: “for it is they who will educate a new generation of children who, in turn, will carry forward all our goals to build a better world for all.”
This call for greater attention to teachers’ capacity development is even more relevant here in Nigeria, where the standard of education, especially in the public sector, has degenerated to low levels, thus forcing most parents and guardians to resort to educating their children in private schools where they pay through the nose.
The travails of the teaching profession in Nigeria are compounded by poor remuneration and general conditions of service, late payment of salaries, neglect of the retraining culture which is so central to the assurance of quality teachers, as well as the generally low esteem of the profession, especially among the youth of today who are reluctant to become willing and enthusiastic teachers.
This year’s World Teachers Day coincides with our year of regime change with promises of new ways of approaching governance across the board. We hope the President Muhammadu Buhari administration will make haste and rescue the educational sector, ensuring that the restoration of the pride and glories of the teaching profession is made paramount. We have a new opportunity to make a thorough reassessment of the needs of the educational sector, with the welfare of teachers being its major focal point.
We commend the international community for sparing a thought for the betterment of the condition of teachers by honouring them with a special day every year and including the wellbeing of teachers as a central issue to be addressed at the universal level through the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).
We are convinced that, if pursued with the zeal with which many countries tackled the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s), teachers will once again take pride of place in the education and upbringing of future generations.
