Dikko Radda, Governor of Katsina State, stated that his administration has hired 7,326 instructors for the state’s primary and secondary schools, demonstrating his commitment to depoliticizing the educational system.
Radda revealed this in an exclusive interview with Channel 4 Newsnight.
“I was able to understand that you cannot achieve anything meaningful in education if you don’t have the teachers. You may have the buildings, you may have the computers but if you don’t have the teachers, you don’t have anything.
“Most of our focus in our reforms in education is on the teachers, we have approved the employment of 7,326 teachers in the state,” he said on the programme which airs on Mondays.
The Governor said that a thorough screening process was used to produce the employment figure and that World Bank representatives had also acknowledged it.
“Before we do that, I have commissioned a committee to conduct examinations on those young men and women. They conducted examinations, they interviewed them,” he added.
He reiterated his commitment to ending political activities in the education sector.
“This time around we will never joke with the education of the state. And we will not politicise education for whatever reason. We will do the right thing genuinely and we will have an opportunity for everyone to get employment without coming from anybody,” the governor said.
He claimed that hiring decisions in the past frequently were made without regard to an applicant’s qualifications, reaffirming that those times are now behind the state’s recruitment process for educators.
“Unlike before, you just employ, you allocate employment to government functionaries, to stakeholders and every other stakeholder in the state that – bring 10, bring 5, bring 20 to employ,” he said.