BY: News Peddlers
Lamido Sanusi, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), claims that the APC government of President Muhammadu Buhari does not value education. He urged the regime to work with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to resolve the impasse.
Since February, ASUU has been on strike.
Mr. Sanusi also urged the regime to invest in education in order to motivate teachers to do their best. He observed that "nowadays, people underestimate the value of education."
"What is happening now is that we have people who have moved into authority and who do not value education because the society is so materialistic," the former emir of Kano added. It's all about money now, and teachers are shunned because they don't have any."
"Most of these teachers have the option to do other courses," he said, "but they chose to educate our children and contribute to our society."
"So, we need to look at our value system and return to our traditional value system of respecting teachers, and if we treat them with respect, we will get a lot from them," the ex-CBN executive said.
The former CBN governor stated this in New York on the sidelines of a three-day Transforming Education Summit while chairing an event titled 'Transforming Education through Grassroots Innovation: A Localised Teacher-Led Approach' on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
"The government must recognize that teachers are human beings. We live in a country with high inflation, and salaries don't get teachers very far, and teaching is a profession that needs to be valued from the bottom up," Mr Sanusi explained. "Our education employees are also health-care workers; what we don't realize is that we have lost so many academics; many people who go abroad to do PhDs do not return."
The former CBN governor also stated that brain drain in the health sector had a negative impact on Nigeria's economy.
"It's a crisis because Nigeria needs doctors. We need teachers in Nigeria because we have spent so much money training them," Mr Sanusi explained. "Both parties (ASUU and the Buhari regime) have an interest in sitting down and talking, making compromises. I believe it is amenable to resolution in good faith."
(NAN)