No fewer than 10, 000 applicants on Tuesday besieged the Ekiti State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) to obtain application forms to teach in public primary schools.
The recruitment exercise, which started on Monday, attracted thousands of applicants from all the 16 Local Governments Areas of the state.
The Nation gathered that the applicants bombarded the commission headquarters, Ado Ekiti, state capital at about 6:30 am to collect the application forms.
It was also learnt that a large portion of the applicants do not fall into the category of personnel advertised by the board.
The recruitment exercise was sequel to the approval of Governor Kayode Fayemi that the board should fill existing vacancies in public primary schools.
The applicants submitted applications in response to an earlier announcement that interested National Certificate in Education and Bachelor in Education holders should report at the office for the recruitment exercise.
The SUBEB Chairman, Prof. Francesca Aladejana in a telephone chat with The Nation, said the turn out of the applicants was massive.
This, he said, compelled the commission to postpone temporarily the ongoing recruitment of teachers into public primary schools.
She said the recruitment process was put on hold to prevent stampede among the thousands of applicants that thronged the SUBEB office to collect the application forms.
Aladejana, who said that the Board is re-strategising to make the employment forms easily accessible to applicants, stated that SUBEB may opt for the use of electronic application process so that applicants can download their forms without necessarily coming to SUBEB office.
The Board chairman disclosed that no fewer than 10,000 applicants had registered to collect the forms in the first day of the two-day exercise.
She added the Board cannot afford to let the applicants rush and injure one another in the process of jostling for the forms.
“We have to postpone the excercise because we didn’t know that they will turn out in such a large number.
“We underestimated the job that young graduates are not likely to come to teach in public primary school. But I tell you today that even people with Master degrees turned up.
“Before the applicants came, we had made solid arrangements for the distribution of the forms. We had 16 centres, one for each local government so that we won’t have reasons for applicants rushing to collect the forms and to forestall too much crowd we specifically indicated that we want only NCE holders and graduates with teaching subjects in the primary school.
“This had gone round but to our amazement this morning, we had unprecedented crowd; the crowd was unimaginable.
“The whole place was filled up. The candidates were rushing and were out of control.
“We had pregnant women, nursing mothers carrying babies and women holding young children; all of them in the crowd.
“It was at that stage that we thought if we start distributing forms and people are rushing, there could be stampede. We don’t want any casualty,” she said.
