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By Mlagiri Kopoka
The Political Platform Correspondent
Mwanza. News about the government’s plan to slash employment by 50 per cent next month due to financial constraints shocks Sowa Mtoo, 23. “I hoped to be employed as public primary school teacher in January following the government’s promise in its 2011/2012 budget. The government didn’t employ a single primary school teacher last year, I hoped it would do this New Year,” she explained.
Graduated as A-grade teacher at Katoke Teachers Training College in Kagera Region in 2010, Mtoo fears that the leaked government’s plan would fuel corruption and nepotism, as teachers scramble for few posts available.
Mtoo is worried that with the President’s Office’s (Civil Service Management) plan leaked through the media recently, she will have to be redundant for at least another year.
Staying at home for yet another year is frightening not only for thousands of young men and women like her, but also to patents, who have heavily invested in their children’s education.Dreams of her mother, Hadija, 51, a widow, who is still teaching at a primary school in Mwanza City, are shattered.“I expected my daughter would secure a job at a public primary school and assist me in taking care of her young brothers,” she said,explaining:
“There were few private primary schools that offer an alternative secure employment. Most of them are after cheap labour such they obtain from Kenyan and Ugandan secondary school leavers,” she lamented.As a parent, the mother said, she felt hopeless for failing to assist her daughter to secure a decent job for which she trained.
“This government must be corrupt if it cannot deliver any of the promises it makes in its budget,” she observes.
Wanjara Yohana, a primary school teacher in the city, said the news was likely to harm the quality of education in the country.
“The report comes in the wake of a mounting tension between teachers and their trade union over teachers’ long outstanding allowance arrears and demands for pay rise,” he wonders.He said the government could not be trusted as critics say, he concluded, predicting that the teacher-pupil ratio would widen and that tensions with civil servants would more than double as a result of the government’s failure to recruit new teachers.
The number of primary school pupils, according to Panning minister, will reach 12 million come 2025, creating a demand for 125,000 new teachers in the next 13 years.
The government’s current employment rate of 15,000 teachers a year suffices to suggest that the country would neither achieve its home grown National Growth and Poverty Reduction strategy popularly known in its Kiswahili acronym as Mkukuta nor the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Julius Mrope, 68, a retired marine maintainance engineer, who used to work with the state-owned Marine Services Company, attributes the public outcry over lack of employment opportunities to degenerating patriotism in the coutry’s history. “It is an open secret that no one is ready to improve the quality of our education system,” he said, observing that there is a false impression painting a colourful picture of achievements registered in universal primary education.
He said statistics indicated that the country was in the right track in meeting the Mkukuta goals by 100 per cent come 2015.
“These impressive enrolment numbers mean nothing if the quality of education remains poor. Our children will one day question our intelligence in ‘putting the cart before the horse” he retorted, adding:“We should all think of having enough teachers in our schools rather than winning donors’ praise for enrolling our children in schools that lack teachers,” he stressed.
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