Northern youths attack Fayemi over El-Rufai’s threat to sack 20,000 Kaduna teachers

A group, Northern Youths Movement, has criticised the Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, for allegedly being the brain behind the recent decision by Governor Nasir El-Rufai to sack over 20,000 teachers in the state.
El-rufai had organised a competency test for teachers in Kaduna State, resulting in the shocking discovery that over 20,000 teachers failed.
The governor has since been threatening the teachers with sack.
But the NYM warned El-Rufai against going ahead with his threat to sack over 20,000 teachers that purportedly failed the competency test.
The Chairman, NYM, Mallam Ishaya Jato, said “it was Dr. Kayode Fayemi, who brought the consultants that conducted the competency test,” alleging that it was done for the purpose of reducing the number of teachers in Kaduna State.
El-Rufai had expressed his resolve to go ahead with the planned sack, saying his administration would not be blackmailed by the threats from the state chapter of the Nigeria Union of Teachers to down tools, if the government sacked its members.
The governor went further to say that recruitment plans for new teachers had already been put in place.
In their reaction, the youths, under the umbrella of NYM, alleged that over N500 million was made from the competency test deal, which they said was also aimed at raising fund for Fayemi’s electioneering campaign in 2018.
The NYM also raised the alarm that the idea of the competency test was already being sold to other Northern states, accusing Fayemi of trying to destroy the educational system in the north with the Teachers Competency Test that teachers in Ekiti State resisted during the minister’s tenure as governor in the
state.
They then vowed to report him to President Muhammadu Buhari and other notable northern leaders in the country.
Calling on teachers in Kaduna State to resist El-Rufai’s plan to sack over 20,000 of them, the youths pledged their support for them, vowing to join in the fight against the governor’s plan to destroy the lives of over 20,000 families by throwing their bread-winners into the labour
market.
Efforts by our correspondent to speak with the minister’s media aide, Olayinka Oyebode, on the allegations leveled against Fayemi by the Northern youth group proved abortive.
Oyebode did not pick calls made to his phone.