Today, January 3, 2021, the portals for taking applications for a new crop of teachers will go live. That begins a new process to fill our schools with qualified and competent tutors who will teach our children in basic classes and senior secondary schools across Kwara State.
It is an enormous task that we do not take for granted. It a task for which our administration will be judged — coming after we painfully nullified a process that had thrown up some 2,414 teachers.
Without mincing words, no patriotic person should defend the nullified process. It was egregiously faulty. Political interests had a field day dictating which individual got a place in our classrooms with scanty regard for merit.
So bad was it that they overshot the legal approvals to engage just 1,100. I do not dispute that a few great hands survived the process. My heart bleeds that those ones were caught in our decision to start the process anew. However, such great hands were exceptions.
A vast majority got the jobs because they knew somebody who knew somebody that knew somebody on Ahmadu Bello Way. Those affected knew this to be true. We couldn’t in good conscience allow that to stand, particularly after we initially gave everyone a chance to prove their worth.