By Pemphero Malimba;
The Parliamentary Committee on Education has differed with the Civil Society Education Coalition (Csec) on the latter’s suggestion that the government should stop training teachers until it absorbs all of them in the civil service.
Csec has faulted the government for failing to employ teachers that graduate from its colleges despite spending millions of Kwacha on their training.
The coalition’s executive director Benedicto Kondowe told The Daily Times that there is a need to stop further training of teachers for two to three years to ensure that the government concentrates on teachers that are unemployed.
“There is also a need to reduce the number of teachers who are being enrolled in teacher training colleges by 80 or 90 percent to ensure that resources meant for training the new teachers are channeled to the recruitment of the already trained teachers. It is surprising that the government is failing to implement the alternatives despite that we presented them [such suggestions] to the Ministry of Education and Parliament a few years back.
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“We believe that our greatest attention should be paid to the issue of dealing with the already available teachers and, in the foreseeable future, we would resume training more teachers because you cannot train more than what the market is demanding,” Kondowe said.
However, Parliamentary Committee on Education Vice Chairperson Ephraim Nayeja said the committee does not subscribe to Csec’s idea.
“We are not for [the idea of taking] that route because when you go out and check some of the primary schools in the country, you will find that there are inadequate teachers, which is not a healthy situation as far as the delivery of quality education services is concerned.
“What we, as a committee for education, would recommend is that the government should continue training teachers and immediately they complete training, they should be employed and sent to primary schools that are in need of them,” Nayeja said.
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He said the committee would continue to take interest in the issue of teacher recruitment.
Asked about the Ministry of Education’s position on teacher recruitment, its spokesperson Mphatso Nkuonera did not indicate the number of teachers that are needed and when the new recruitment would exactly take place.
“Government will continue employing primary school teachers. We appreciate the great role teachers play,” Nkuonera said.
Meanwhile, representatives of unemployed primary school teachers in the country continue to pressurise the government to permanently absorb them into the system.
Last month, the representatives halted planned demonstrations to pave the way for contact and dialogue upon invitation by ministry officials.
But after the meeting was conducted on April 26, the unemployed teachers remain unconvinced with the ministry’s current stand.
“We have since called for a stakeholders meeting, where we want the ministries of Education, Local Government, the Treasury, the Anti- Corruption Bureau, Csec and others to help address our grievances. We believe in contact and dialogue as it remains the only way possible to achieve our goal,” unemployed primary school teachers national spokesperson Cornelius Mwalure told The Daily Times Tuesday.
There are at least 13,000 unemployed teachers from IPTE 14,15,16 and 17 in the country.
When presenting the budget policy document to Parliament in February this year, Finance Minister Simplex Chithyola Banda did not specify the number of teachers the government planned to employ during the current financial year.
