NUT wants role in implementation of school feeding scheme

The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) wants to be involved in the implementation of the Federal Government’s School Feeding Scheme, just as it stressed the need for the programme to be channeled to benefit the poor.

Again, the union has also commended the Federal Government’s plan to recruit 500,000 graduate teachers to boost basic education and reiterated its warning that the policy should never be used as a means of compensating political patronage as has been the practice in the past.

The union has is also calling on the National Assembly to picket private school over their refusal to comply with minimum wage payment.

President of the union, Mr. Michael Olukoya, while speaking at a solemn assembly organised by the union in Abuja, said the Federal Government should carry the teachers along in the school feeding programme so that it would not only record a resounding success, but achieve its intended aims and objectives.

Olukoya described the plan to recruit 500, 000 graduate teachers as laudable and in line with its demand for the employment of more professional teachers to address the long identified problem of shortage of manpower.

He said: “The stand of NUT is that this 500,000 people that are going to be employed are Nigerians, but we want to appeal to the government of President Muhammadu Buhari to put the right peg in the right hole. The idea of recruiting engineers, architects and lawyers in the name of teaching profession might not serve the desired goals. We want the government to have a rethink by making sure that those that are to be recruited are professional teachers.”

Olukoya who said that it was necessary to carry teachers along because the union has more information regarding areas of lack added that, “There are enough qualified teachers who are roaming the streets that need to be employed. The money we are going to use to train non-teachers ahead of their deployment could be saved for another thing if only professional teachers are employed.”