By Ifeanyi John Nwokeabia
Life is a dictionary loaded with words with different meanings. Even when you have read all, you can’t still remember all their meanings but you have to know and remember the ones you can, and leave others for further studies. Always be ready to learn life, one at a time as students learn new words after reading a passage. A long stints in the teaching profession has allayed my eyes to the tainted masters—servants relationship existing between teachers, parents of their wards and school management.
There’s a popular Igbo proverb that says that when a bad way of life is practised for a long time without being questioned, it will become a tradition. Many in the recent times abhor the name ‘slavery’ believing that it’s no longer in existence. But the truth remains that crime once invented, can’t leave the environment anymore, rather, it will multiply or reduce depending on measures taken to either promote or denounce it. But one may ask; who are the slaves? Who are slaves masters? And who are the slaves traders? Simply put; slaves are the teachers, the slave masters are the parents, and school management are the slave traders. You may call it triangular relationship.
Trans-Atlantic trade saw the forceful sales of helpless humans who were taken across boarder to work and not earn in a master’s farm. Such masters retain the power to resell them or use them and discard them at will. Such conditions of slaves are not far from what private school teachers are going through in their respective schools in the present society. Except that they are not sold like baggage of stockfish to be shipped and dumped in another land, rather, they are used like rags by their employers. Need I tell you that students are accorded more respect in private schools than their teachers? Students may likely decide the death(sack) of a teacher in most schools without trial. If a teacher’s level of discipline is perceived by the students as wickedness, forget it, you are either fired or publicly disgraced by the school management.
The economic changes in the country do not change private school teachers’ salary. Schools pay teachers as low as seven thousand naira(7,000), ten thousand naira (₦10,000), Fifteen thousand naira (₦15,000) etc at the end of a complete month. In other words, there’s no remuneration regulations regulating payments in private schools. Someone might say, will a proprietor accept to pay what he can’t afford at the end of the month? No, he is not supposed to, but considering the work load given to a single teacher; three teachers may find such work hard to do. No one cares the number of years you have spent in the school or the qualification you have. The remuneration has no level. Someone resuming work today may earn what someone who has been on the job for five years is earning. It levels equally every certificate. How do you expect a man earning such a meager salary to eat well, dress well, and live well? It’s possible for some to keep striving to survive in genuine way, while some may give up and take to other dubious means of survival.
Teachers’ attainment of seminars, workshops, symposium etc is never part of the school calendar. They will drain everything you have. Making sure you have nothing and when you plead for better welfare, you hear something like, ‘for your ten years with us, what have we benefitted from you?’ This is just because they have sapped your juicy best and wished to end your stay like the case of an overused rag. The innovative ideas garnered from Workshops and other trainings which can enhance a teacher’s understanding of his or her subject area is not invested in. Rather, they are always like the famous Oliver Twist, always asking for more. When they succeed in keeping some teachers till old age when they can’t perform again, they will discard them like a spoilt disc, never to be used again.
Some proprietors/ proprietress who are suffering from ‘self entitlement’ will not put into consideration the environment they are before whitewashing their teachers (employee). Sometimes, it might be on the assembly ground where every eye of the students will be on the teacher. A teacher will just swallow hard like a slave before his master, and make so many silent noise. Any report presented to the school by parents against a teacher ( even when the teacher is innocent), no one investigates the case, rather, the teacher is blamed and the student is exonerated just to ‘maintain’ the school’s ‘image’. I won’t blame the management because they need the parents’ money. Besides, what’s a school without finance to run her affairs? A teacher is paid and doesn’t contribute money just like a lamb as captured in the scripture has uttered nothing even on the way to the abbatoir. A teacher in private school can only say, ‘sorry Sir/Madam’, in every situation or end up losing his or her job. After all, there are many jobless people waiting to replace you, once you are gone. In some proprietors’ voice, ‘ we don’t care about quality, hence the person ‘can’ teach’.
One of Boyles law, I beg to paraphrase, states that opposite action brings about equal reaction. Teachers on the verge of trying to solve the BODMAS of building at least an infrastructure of a mouthful, ended up forming some avoidable bad habits. These habits have continued to ridicule the foundation dream of the founding fathers of the profession.
To be favoured by parents and guardians, teachers turned bootlickers. Some go as far as painting their colleagues black just to get little tips. Issues of backstabbing and slandering have become songs of worship amongst private school teachers who abandoned the main causes of their predicament to chase innocent rats(colleagues) who equally keep low profile to run away from the eye-piercing and fault-finding employers who can in most cases reluctantly pay them meager salaries that hardly survive them.
A king who never takes advice from people was allowed to go to the market with a torn clothes, only to be laughed and jeered at in the market. Teachers have formed the habit of such a King, some of them felt that they know everything and wouldn’t want to be schooled by anyone. They go against the ethics of teaching profession and when a colleague tries to correct him or her, it will become a horrendous rain of insults that will be gushing like blood from their mouths. If a masquerade decides to wear itself, it should be ready to face whatsoever thing that comes its way on its movement to the market square says an Igbo proverb. Slaves are sometimes theirs problem. You will find out that in some private schools, when a colleague is elevated by the proprietor to oversee the affairs of others, he or she may turn out to do more than the proprietor himself or herself in enslaving her colleagues. This is not a good development in the teaching profession. Like a football team, teachers in a school should work in love and harmony to achieve stipulated goals.
However, slaves can’t get their freedoms if they can’t fight for it. Teachers in private school are supposed to rise above the occasion if they truly want to see their vindication in the nearest future. One can’t sit and wishes change to happen except if one puts efforts to see it happen. Aminat Sowfall’s Beggars Strike and Ousmene Sembene’s God’s Bit of Wood are the two revolutionary novels that should open their eyes to see that they deserve better than what they are being given. Can you imagine a teacher teaching two to three subjects to students of over two hundred and fifty(250 and above)? Is he or she a bulldozer? Just imagine the energy burn on daily basis by that teach in teaching those children. Remember, there are other duties which the school can assign to you aside the work of teaching. And at the end of the month, he or she will go home more bankrupt is more saddening! The common need of a living human can’t be met, no one talks of spicing up life with human wants. Are teachers born to suffer? Or should they continue to wait for the promised heavenly rewards while they starve to death on earth? Besides, are we not all running the same heavenly race?
I have heard people talked about ‘side hustle’ or extra work outside teaching to make more money. But a private school teacher hardly has such time for extra work aside his or her school work. Most schools are not dismissing on time in the evening. Some schools are now six to six affairs. Teachers are to come to school at 6am and go home 6pm everyday. They are mandated to wait for the parents of every child to come to school to pick their children before they are allowed to go home. The extra hours spent by such teachers went in vain. No extra pay. They are just done for the sake of a monthly pay that can’t survive their debt. Some private school teachers after evaluating themselves by months end will always hiss and ask himself or herself, ‘ am I really working or jobless?’
Nwokeabia, Ifeanyi John, a poet and teacher writes in from Awka, Anambra State
