The Federal Ministry of Education (FME) has come under fire from some Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN) members for elevating 42 teachers who, based on their birth dates, should have left the civil service.
The identified teachers, also known as unification schools, are reportedly some of those who were recently promoted to the positions of director and deputy director, as well as appointed principals of some of the 104 federally controlled institutions.
42 of the more than 100 officials who were promoted, according to the complainants, were not supposed to benefit from the newly legislated raised retirement age for teachers. They don’t want to be named out of fear of repercussions. Although the law was only gazetted in 2022, the government has argued that its action is legitimate and that it began to be implemented earlier in 2021, notwithstanding this. The Nigerian government inaugurated 112 directors and deputy directors last week, and after they passed promotion exams, some of them were named principals of the unification schools. The two-part exam started on August 16 with a computer-based test, and those who succeeded went on to take an oral interview between August 17 and August 19.
However, some of the new appointees’ coworkers claimed that many of them should have retired in 2021. They asserted that the law the government used to grant them an extension of their service years only went into effect in April after being gazetted.
