By Lekan Bilesanmi

Dr Dikko Suleiman is the chairman of the Katsina State Universal Basic Education Board, SUBEB. In this interview, he explains why some teachers were kicked out in the state  even as some  administrators were sent to the classroom while many  teachers  became  administrators.

How has it been managing Katsina SUBEB?
Although I am only three  months in the saddle, I discovered that most of the problems the sector  was facing was lack of supervision on the part of the personnel responsible for the development of our education. So, what I did when  I assumed office was to organize an inspection crew that went  round the schools meting out  punishment to teachers, pupils and even parents that failed  to contribute their quota to the education development of the state, in particularly, the lazy teachers, those not up to the task, we flushed  them out immediately.

How do you mean those not up to the task?
I mean  those who had no teaching qualification and those who were not ready to do the job properly.  On teachers training, I realized that their main problem was how to teach. Though they had  the knowledge of teaching, how to impact it to the understanding of the students appeared  to be the problem. We then set up a committee comprising educationists  to  come out with the modality on how to improve the sector, the primary and secondary school I mean.

We are awaiting their report. We made  new changes in terms of effectiveness of the personnel both in the classroom  and  in the office so that those who are better utilized in the classroom and they are in the office, we deploy to the classroom and vice versa. We discovered that some of the teachers perform better as administrators. So, presently, in Katsina, there is nobody beyond the classroom. An administrator can be posted to  the classroom once we discovere the classroom is better for him.

Gov Ibrahim Shema

What is the driving force behind this radical change you are making?
I am an educationist. I did my Grade 2, NCE, B.Ed, M.Ed & Ph.D,  in education. I have never worked in any  other sector, from  primary school to  the university level. So when I came here, I discovered that a lot of things had been messed up. Like some of the subjects in the school were too many and  beyond the comprehension of the students. Imagine  primary 1 – 3 having 12 subjects.

We slashed it to 4 subjects with emphasis on Mathematics and English because, once you are good in English and Mathematics, you can catch up at any level.  Classes 4 to 6, we slashed it to 7 subjects instead of 24. How could a primary school student have 24 subjects? In which subjects will he excel? You end up teaching them nothing and they understand nothing. As an educationist, I did my master’s and Ph.D in child development; so I am so lucky that I am posted here where I know the problems of children.

You have completely new  structures for  primary schools. What informed this?
We shared the buildings  among the local government areas not only within the metropolis but in the hinterlands. We have three of such in each of the local governments. The essence of the buildings  really is to curtail the increase in the population of students. Where we notice that  students are on the increase in a particular locality, instead of building one small building and litter them around, we say why not build a massive building that will contain  all of them?

That is why the buildings are concentrated in the urban areas  of each local government area. For example, in Katsina here, we have primary school that has more than 3,000 students; so how many buildings are we going to erect? Building is not for building sake, but for the purpose of containing the explosion of students.

The state operates a totally free education policy. What has been the response of the people?
It has been quite encouraging. The response has been massive. But more than that, in terms of motivation on the part of the teachers, I can  tell you that there is no state that pays much premium to the teaching personnel like we do here in Katsina State. The new salary structure, TSS, has been implemented in the state. So the teachers are well motivated to give their best. Further training while on the job is free here. For example,  if a teacher gets the TRC certificate, there is an allowance  attached to it. That is one of the ways of encouraging and motivating our teachers.

It is not totally rosy, what are the challenges?
The greatest challenge is to make the teachers do their best because,  no matter what you do in education, if the staff are not ready, you cannot make any positive contribution and this is the greatest challenge in any institution of learning. No amount of instructional materials, if the teachers are not committed, there is no way there can be improvement. In our own days, there was hardly  instructional materials, but the teachers were committed and we are better for it now. So  the commitment  is what we are lacking.

And that is why we introduced  impromptu supervision and on – the-spot- assessment of teachers;  things have been improving because what we do is that  we assess whether  you  can teach;  if  you can’t, we find out the problem;  if it is in area of furthering  your knowledge, we send  you  on course to improve.