Text of press conference by Tijjani Abdullahi, Chairman of the Kaduna State Universal Basic Education Board (KADSUBEB), held on Thursday, 2nd December 2021

Gentlemen of the press,

1. The Kaduna State Universal Basic Education Board (KADSUBEB) wishes to update you on recent developments in its continuous quest to improve standards in public basic education schools.
2. As part of its responsibility to ensure that all teachers actually have the qualifications they presented, the Board launched a certificate verification exercise in April 2021. The major objective of this exercise was to ensure that all our teachers have the requisite credentials that constitute the basic qualifications for employment as teachers.
3. So far, the Board has verified 451 certificates by contacting the institutions that awarded the certificates. Nine of the 13 institutions contacted have responded, as at today.
4. The responses from the institutions show that 233 teachers presented fake certificates. This represents 51% of the 451 certificates on which responses have been received from the awarding institutions. One institution disowned 212 of these 233 fake certificates.
5. The Board will dismiss the 233 teachers who presented these fake certificates, while their files will be forwarded to the Ministry of Justice to initiate prosecution for forgery. The Board will continue to check the integrity of the certificates presented by teachers to ensure that this critical profession is not devalued by impostors.
6. As part of our duty of transparency, the names of the 233 teachers found to have presented fake certificates will be uploaded on the website of the Kaduna State Government today.
7. The Board also wishes to inform the people of Kaduna State that it will shortly be conducting the competency test for teachers. When the Kaduna State Government recruited 25,000 new teachers after the 2017 competency test, it made clear that it will continue to assess its teachers both for their own improvement and for better delivery of learning outcomes for pupils.
8. The Board will follow up the competency test with series of training programmes, organised in batches for teachers. This will begin in January 2022 for 12,254 teachers. The Board has signed MoUs with the National Teachers Institute, the College of Education, Gidan Waya, and the Federal College of Education, Zaria, to conduct the training exercise.

Thank you for listening.