'Govt keen on engaging unqualified teachers'

SCHOOLS opened for the third term on Tuesday with the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education rushing to fill more than 10,000 vacant teaching posts with temporary teachers, while thousands of qualified teachers are still awaiting re-engagement.

Teachers' unions are now demanding that the Civil Service Commission (CSS) should ease red tape and clear the way for the re-engagement of teachers who left the profession at the height of the economic crisis between 2000 and 2009.

A 2012 report by the then Ministry of Education, Sport, Art and Culture said close to 30,000 teaching vacancies of the 127,852 posts were unfilled. The statistics showed the government employed 98,446 teachers and 12,713 of these were untrained.

Unions say the decision to keep the returning teachers sidelined while temporary teachers are engaged was a key contributor to the low pass rates increasingly being recorded in public examinations.

In July, the unions said at least 3,000 returning teachers were stranded after applying for re-employment in the civil service.

A senior education official said the Civil Service Commission (CSC) was using impossible and stringent conditions on "prodigal" teachers.

Sifiso Ndlovu, the Zimbabwe Teachers Asociation (Zimta) chief executive officer, yesterday said the criteria used by the CSC appeared aimed at keeping the returning teachers out in the cold.

Ndlovu said part of the provisions of Section 1 of 2000, which details the conditions of service, was that if an employee absconds, they have to be taken through a disciplinary hearing meaning that the teachers who left without notice at the height of the economic meltdown had to go for hearings as part of the vetting process.

He told Chronicle: "Our argument is that how does the government then try 27,000 teachers who left employment at the time? Do they have resources to do that? It has been more than two years since teachers have been trying to get re-employed but no-one has ever been tried. That's why we've been advocating for a blanket amnesty on the part of the teachers because the process is almost impossible.

"We've teachers who are qualified but are not teaching, which affects children's access to education. This inevitably leads to the recruitment of untrained staff, even President Mugabe once mentioned that there's need to hire qualified teachers.

"Teachers are ready to do their job and we might even benefit from the experience they attained outside the country. There's no need to persecute teachers who sought employment elsewhere at the time of the economic crisis because we need to look at the bigger picture."

Ndlovu said he did not have statistics on the present deployment of teachers in provinces, but quickly added: "I have it on good authority that a lot of people that are not qualified teachers are getting jobs as temporary teachers at the provincial and district education offices.

"That's our disappointment and protestation that the government seems keener on engaging unqualified teachers when there're qualified ones."

Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) president Takavafira Zhou said it was unfortunate that the country did not have a recruitment policy based on the needs of specific areas.

"We understand that even students who graduated from various teacher training colleges are stranded without employment. When they approach the commission, they're referred back to the district offices who don't have the power to employ them," he said.

"The other thing is that the government has not computersised its database of teachers so that they know exactly the number of teachers it employs and also deploy according to requirements of areas. This has created a lot of confusion."

Zhou said the pass rate was linked to the lack of a computersised database as teachers were being sent to teach subjects they did not specialise in during training.

"There's also need for the commission to ease the red tape in readmitting qualified teachers so that there's improved quality of tutors in our schools," he said.

Returning teachers told Chronicle that their friends who were "connected" had gone to Harare and got re-engaged by the CSC.

"Those of us who don't know anyone are sometimes lucky to get one-year contracts. The problem is that we're not paid during school holidays under the contracts. We might be forced to return to the Diaspora," said one of the teachers.