The Osun State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has urged the state government led by Governor Ademola Adeleke to reinstate some 1500 it sacked shortly after assuming office.
It stated that it was counterproductive for government to politicise educational policy as its unintended boomerang effects would have a devastating result on the innocent pupils and students.
Adeleke belongs to the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and only became governor last November.
His predecessor, Gboyega Oyetola of the APC had recruited these teachers in the twilight of its administration. But Adeleke sacked them later.
Now opposing APC described the sack as one of the governor’s “obnoxious executive orders”.
It said that Governor Adeleke took the decision out of “hatred and vindictiveness” as anything that has to do with his predecessor, former Governor Gboyega Oyetola, was reversed.
Oyetola who had initially recruited 1,000 teachers had disclosed that he would make the teachers’ recruitment up to 2,500 by adding another 1,500 based on the financial capability of the state then.
“It was however, surprising that the victims of one of the unpopular and ill-thought-out executive orders of Governor Adeleke was the immediate sack of the last batch of the 1,500 public school teachers recruited by Oyetola during the period that he statutorily functioned as the executive governor of the state.”
The Osun State chairman of the National Union of Teachers, Comrade Muritala Falade, who is not a partisan politician, had raised alarm in an interview with a local newspaper in Osogbo three days ago, alerting the public to the fact that there is a serious dearth of teachers in all the public schools in the state.
“The absolutely worried Falade explained further that the worst hit about the shortage of teachers are the schools in the rural areas.”
In his response, the Acting State Chairman of the APC, Sooko Tajudeen Lawal, in a statement issued by the party’s Director of Media and Information, Chief Kola Olabisi, in Osogbo today, Monday, June 26, was full of encomiums for Comrade Falade for having the courage, leadership will and unionism dexterity to voice out the unpalatable situation of the public schools.
Lawal enjoined all the parents and guardians to show their gratitude to the state NUT chairman as he has nothing to lose if he has not come up with such a rare courage to furnish the members of the public about the excruciating condition of the public schools orchestrated by shortage of teachers.
The Acting State APC chairman told Governor Adeleke to realise that his decision to sack the 1,500 teachers was not well thought out by him and the action was rash, impertinent, brash and borne out of vindictiveness and executive recklessness.
Lawal explained that no serious-minded government worth its salt would play a dirty politics with the education of the younger ones who are the fulcrum of the future of the state.
He hinted that it is not too late for Governor Adeleke to go back to his vomit by instantly recalling the 1,500 teachers recruited by Oyetola that he had sacked without any justification under the law of the land.
In Lawal’s words: “Since those recruited teachers are indigenes of Osun State and were duly employed during the statutory tenure of his predecessor, Governor Adeleke has no reason not to reconsider his earlier mistake of relieving the innocent teachers of their employment.
“We are quite aware that Governor Adeleke won’t be bringing new teachers from another planet or states as the ones sacked by him were products of due process.
“A stitch in time saves nine, so says an adage”.
