By Shehu Auwal Shitu
Primarily, they did all their best to help you at nonsensical stage of life; taught you how to read and write; handed you over to their co-workers, who secondarily trained you to choose a distinguished career, and advancingly promoted you to higher level, where your dreams came true. And not only that, but also equipped you with an ability to discern right from wrong. This category of professionals, who immensely contributed to what you have today been, deserves any respect. Thanks to our teachers!
teachers, in the whole world, are the people who tirelessly work to help a nation achieve its aims and objectives. They of course spend day and night working to metamorpose society's outlook by producing patriotic and productive members. This includes: medical doctors, engineers, politicians, agriculturists, lawyers, judges, journalists, and even security personnel among many others. Are they not nation builders, stumbling blocks to ignorance and stepping-stone to bright future?
In addition to this, in some countries like China, Malaysia etc. teachers have been excellent, exemplary, amiable and well-paid; whose earning, if it might be compared, can provide more than expectation. And they're the constant object of warmest respectability, devotion and love, from all and sundry.
But in Nigeria, teachers have no respect; everybody looks down on them, nobody wants to go into education any more, no balance between teachers' earning and expenditure, those who were already in it are more than willing to quit, and job offer in education is the last choice one can start with before getting another job. What do you think of it in the long run as everybody decided to stay away from it? Who could teach our children? Could every Tom, Dick and Harry produced as a teacher by N.C.E--awarding centres handle the situation? Is Nigeria ever ready to educationally, economically and politically develop?
We're all students with different qualifications, fashioned by character and learning. in this regard, character means respect, that's, respecting not only teachers but also other personalities, unfortunately, they're (teachers) the ones whom we first disrepect after being successful as a payback, we amusingly nickname them, insult them, recent of which is Asuu's case where many students wrote against them, and part of the strike is to control high cost of education as government intended to stay back and expand access to university education.
Certainly, Education, which has statutorily been declared free, is now very expensive that many can't afford it, and have nowhere to table any complain to, neither ASUU nor Federal Government. To more than 70 percent of Nigerians, secondary school education would automatically be their border line where they would stop and look for possible way out for themselves, and those who don't have a privilege to do it, will be roaming the streets as beggers, others with bad intention becoming political hoodlums, thiefs, armed robbers, kidnappers, and computer wizard among them yahoo boys, as Buhari's administration wants to introduce cashless policy without prior planning.
If you're highly educated and academically balanced, what about your children, brothers, sisters and other people around you who are not? If secondary school education, as mentioned above, is enough for them, the chain and only weapon (education) to our freedom is snatched away from us, because there should be limit on where we can go and who we can become. We need to rethink our highly developed instinct for being unpolite to our teachers.
This is a wake-up call that education has now gone beyond expectations and teachers, whom we underestimate, should now be regarded.
S. Auwal
Wrote from Azare, Bauchi State.
17th January, 2023
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