King’s College concession threatens public education, NUT warns FG

The Nigeria Union of Teachers has raised concerns over the Federal Government’s plan to hand over the management of King’s College, Lagos, to a private association, describing the move as a departure from the principle of public education and an unacceptable form of privatisation.

The National President of the NUT, Audu Amba, raised the concern in his address at the opening of the 59th (8th Quadrennial) National Conference of Delegates held at the International Conference Centre, Enugu, on Tuesday.

Amba said the union would resist any attempt to transfer the management and operational responsibility of the 116-year-old college to the King’s College Old Boys’ Association under a Public-Private Partnership arrangement.

“While the NUT recognises the valuable contributions of old students and other stakeholders to the development of educational institutions, the union strongly opposes the transfer of the management and operational responsibility of King’s College, Lagos, to a private association,” Amba told delegates from the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory.

He added, “It is our position that education is a public responsibility and a fundamental right, not a commercial privilege. Therefore, public schools must remain accessible to the Nigerian people. We call for the immediate suspension and reversal of the concession arrangement and the commencement of meaningful consultation with critical stakeholders, including teachers and parents.”

The NUT president also listed several challenges confronting the nation’s education sector, including poor remuneration and welfare of teachers, shortage of teachers, decaying infrastructure, inadequate instructional materials, underfunding, insecurity and attacks on schools, poor implementation of education policies and the digital divide.

He lamented that the Federal Government’s budgetary allocations to education over the years had remained far below the internationally recommended benchmarks of at least 15 to 20 per cent, while noting that allocations by most states were “abysmally poor.”

Amba further appealed to the Federal Government to work with key stakeholders, especially state governments, to ensure the implementation of the approved incentives and welfare packages for teachers announced by the Minister of Education during the 2020 World Teachers’ Day celebration.

The incentives include the payment of a special salary scale for teachers in basic and secondary schools, reintroduction of bursary awards to education students, a special teachers’ pension scheme, career path policies, construction of low-cost houses for teachers in rural areas, provision of loan facilities for agriculture, housing, cars and motorcycles, as well as free tuition and automatic admission for the biological children of teachers.

On the implementation of the Harmonised Retirement Age for Teachers Act (2022), the NUT president expressed dismay that while many states had commenced implementation of the Act, which provides for retirement at 60 years of age or after 40 years of service, whichever comes first, some states, including the FCT, were introducing extraneous guidelines in contravention of the law.

He also decried what he described as the “divide-and-rule” tactics deployed by some state governments in recognising a purported “Academic Staff Union of Secondary Schools” (ASUSS), insisting that the NUT remained the only registered, recognised and authorised trade union to unionise public primary and secondary school teachers in Nigeria.

Declaring the conference open, Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State said his administration had kept faith with its promise to make education a transformative force in the state, disclosing that education had received over 33 per cent of the state’s total budget across three budget cycles, well above UNESCO’s 15 to 20 per cent threshold.

He said the recruitment of 6,850 teachers and other education personnel was an important expression of his administration’s commitment, adding that fully equipped and technology-driven Smart Green Schools across the state’s 260 wards were designed to prepare children for the future.

Speaking on the conference theme, “Deployment of Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Education Will Erode the Place of Teachers in the Classroom: Myth or Reality?”, Mbah said technology and AI should be approached not as fearsome instruments coming to take away jobs but as handmaids of development.

“AI can assist the teacher. It can personalise learning, support lesson preparation, identify learning gaps and expand access to knowledge. But it cannot replace the human qualities that make a teacher a teacher — the ability to inspire, to mentor, to understand a child’s individual circumstances, to build character and to kindle ambition,” he said.

“The future is therefore not teacher versus technology. The future is teacher with technology.”

In his welcome address, the Chairman of the NUT, Enugu State Wing, Theophilus Odo, described the conference as a forum for reflection, strategising and re-energising the collective commitment to the teaching profession, urging delegates to focus on innovative solutions to the challenges confronting education.