Of Teachers And Buhari’s Placebo

Besides its use as a medical term, the word placebo is also figuratively defined to mean ‘a way of trying to please someone who is not satisfied about something’. In other words, it is another way of attempting to placate someone or sell him a dummy.
Sometime in October last year, President Muhammadu Buhari reportedly approved a range of incentives that, by all intents and purposes, qualified as a placebo to teachers employed into the nation’s civil service at the basic and secondary school levels. No doubt, his unsuspecting victims are obviously relishing the effect already.
According to his Minister of Education, Mr. Adamu Adamu, the President approved the new incentives to improve the conditions of service for teachers in Nigeria.
“It was with this clear understanding of the role of the teacher in the emerging knowledge economy and the need to attract and retain the best brains in our educational institutions that the President approved a range of incentives in order to revitalise and reposition the teaching profession,” he said.
Adamu explained that the first incentive was to restrict the employment of teachers into the civil service to highly gifted and academically outstanding graduates with the right attitudinal and emotional inclinations.
The new order also seeks to establish a special salary scale for teachers in primary and secondary schools, including provisions for special rural posting allowances; science teachers’ allowances; increased retirement age from 60 to 65 years; and also the years of service from 35 to 40, whichever comes first. Added to these, is the institution of a Special Teacher Pension Scheme to enable the teaching profession retain its highly experienced hands.
In order to attract the best brains into the teaching cadre, the minister said Mr. President had also approved the re-introduction of automatic bursary awards to Education students and the funding of their teaching practice from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND).
All these, he assured, would be packaged into the Harmonised Retirement Age for Teachers in Nigeria Bill 2020 which has already been approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and is now on its way to the National Assembly for legislative fine-tuning.
To attain all government objectives and strategies in this regard, a National Implementation Committee on the Revitalisation and Repositioning of the Teaching Profession in Nigeria was raised under the chairmanship of the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Mr. Sonny Echono.
While the perm sec assured that his committee was already in talks with the states and their Heads of Service under the auspices of the National Council of Establishment, he, however, feared that there may be prolonged deliberations with other agencies like the National Incomes, Salaries and Wages Commission to work out a new salary scale for teachers.
Much as it is natural to expect every lover of quality education in Nigeria to begin to pop Champaign in celebration of a dream-come-true for our teachers, I shall, however, drink with caution; not for fear of being intoxicated, but surely in realisation of the fact that such incentives had, in the past, constituted mere paper largesse. They had amounted to near intangibility in real terms. For instance, a special rural posting allowance, as is being hyped up on paper, might amount to just N3000 per month for a teacher on Salary Grade Level 12. And given the very harsh economic circumstances in the countryside, can this paltry sum be considered a worthy incentive for such a principal officer? Certainly not!
Again, even if they all accept to flow along with the federal government on this, who would ever want to wager that the states would submit to lavishing any more perquisites on some set of civil servants who should even be grateful to their governments for hiring them in the first place? Yes, just as the entire workforce is seen as undeserving of any full payment of the subsisting N30,000 New National Minimum Wage and pension backlogs in almost all the 36 states and FCT, so will the teachers’ unpaid allowances become a cogent reason for incessant labour strikes across the country in the near future. Dealing yet another blow to our education system?
And who even said that now is the best time for President Buhari and his Adamu to begin to tinker with the idea of new incentives. Certainly the Nigerian economy is far from being in good health nor have the tertiary institutions become better staffed and equipped to begin the process of churning out the required caliber of teachers for whom the new emoluments are being determined.
Honestly, notwithstanding how pissed off one can sometimes get with some of Buhari’s positions on matters of state; I will always award him maximum score on presidential carriage. To be sure, I am sometimes disarmed by his uncommon simplicity and no-holds-barred disposition. For example, even as erstwhile US President Donald Trump is known to be extremely voluble, it was Buhari (apparently without anyone’s prompting) who disclosed to Nigerians and indeed the world the secret discussion he had with his host in Washington DC concerning the killing of Christians back home in Nigeria. I am still not comfortable with his response to Mr. Trump but I really admired his gut regarding this rare disclosure. And Trump never countered his account of what transpired between them in that White House inner recess.
Nevertheless, it beats me as to how Buhari has allowed himself to be led to administer this placebo on our teachers knowing full well that the nation is currently cash-strapped to bear such burden and that he will have left office by the time everything is tidied up for a meaningful implementation of the new order. Of course, except if somebody can prove to me that the ruling party is not already in search of campaign promises for 2023.
Well, let our teachers continue to pray and hope that the economy picks up pretty soon and that whoever eventually replaces Buhari would be most receptive to what the outgoing chief executive bequeaths in terms of assets and liabilities.

By: Ibelema Jumbo