Here are the Nigerian states with the highest number of teachers:
The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) is the statutory organization that registers teachers in Nigeria.
An individual is deemed to be a teacher only after successfully registering with TRCN. Interestingly, data obtained from the current edition TRCN Statistical Digest show that Nigeria has a total of about one million three hundred and eighty primary school teachers.
However, there are only six states with more than fifty thousand registered teachers at this level. Let us take a look at these states.
The state at the top of the pack is Oyo. This state was created out of the defunct Western Region by the military government of General Murtala Muhammed in the late 1970s. This state, according to Nigerian Digest of Education Statistics (NDES), has about six thousand four hundred primary schools.
There are currently more than eighty thousand registered primary school teachers in this state. Twenty thousand of them are men while about sixty thousand are females.
Imo State currently has the second highest number of registered teachers in Nigeria. It is one of the two states created out of the defunct East Central State in 1976. There are currently about seventy five thousand registered teachers across the 9600 primary schools in this state.
The next two states in this list are Benue and Kogi States which are incidentally in the same (North Central) geopolitical zone of the country.
However, the former was created from the old Benue-Plateau State in the 1970s while the latter was created in the early 1990s.
They have about 61781 and 60441 respectively. Interestingly, two-thirds of the registered teachers in each of these two states are men.
Lagos is the fifth state in this category. It is worthy of note that this was among the first set of states that were created in 1960s. It has about fifty nine thousand seven hundred registered teachers.
It is followed by Akwa Ibom and Delta states.
The former has about fifty two thousand registered teachers while the latter has about fifty one thousand eligible teachers.