By: Mayen Etim
KADUNA, North-West, Nigeria – The Director General and Chief Executive, National Teachers’ Institute, (NTI), Professor Garba Azare has said 25,000 graduates who passed out of the Institute years ago were recently issued certificates.
He made the disclosure on Thursday, April 18, 2019 when he received the executive members of the Kaduna State Council of Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), on courtesy call to his office.
The NTI boss called on the Federal Government, (FG) to as a matter of urgency upgrade the institute to full time university of education by distance learning.
He noted that the institute was established to train, retrain and certificate teachers at all levels, using distance learning techniques.
According to him, the need to upgrade the institute to university has become necessary since its affiliation to other universities has increased the expenses of running the programme.
He explained that the affiliation has made the courses more expensive as well as out of reach of many prospective teachers.
“So upgrading the institute to university will certainly enable many teachers to benefit from the training programmes. They will have more access and the courses will be cost effective and a pride place for teachers being the only single mode institution dedicated to teacher education in Nigeria
“We train Teachers all over the 36 States and the Federal Capital Territory. We also undertake what we call pivotal training of grade two teachers to NCE holders.
“We have collected a backlog of 25,000 PGDE certificates from Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto. The certificates have been dispatched to the graduands through our state offices.
“The institute has just completed development and installation of a brand new and robust results’ processing software based on the latest technology with a view to tracking results processing,” he stated.