This is not the best of time for Primary and Secondary School pupils and students in Imo State as teachers recruited under Governor Rochas Okorocha’s Youth Must Work programme have abandoned the students over non-payment of their monthly salaries for seven months.


After sacking more than 5000 teachers employed by his predecessor in 2011, Governor Okorocha had through the newly established Community Government Council, CGC, recruited about 7000 primary and secondary school teachers in November 2013 with monthly salary of N20,000 to each of the teachers. He also promised to make their job permanent after six months probation.

Investigations revealed that 15 months later, the teachers are still under probation and their N20,000 salaries stopped while they are still teaching. Only principals and vice principals or head teachers were in schools and sometimes they came to schools once a week.


In some of the schools where teachers still came to school, some of them who spoke to our reporter lamented that their salaries were stopped since August 2014 and that they were being owed about seven months. One of them who identified himself as Ozodi told our reporter that the situation had become so unbearable for him because he left his fairly-paid job at MTN and joined the teaching job because it came from the state government.