'Give us teachers who can speak Shangani'

Communities in Sengwe communal lands in southern Chikombedzi have called on the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education to stop deploying teachers who have no Shangani background as this was compromising the education standards of their children.

The call comes after Chiredzi district education office received newly recruited teachers who have since been deployed to their respective schools.

Chiredzi East Member of Parliament Denford Masiya last week said it was unfair for the ministry to continue deploying teachers who have zero knowledge about Shangani while able candidates from the community are jobless. He said the community was going to resist the deployment of such teachers.

"That is constitutionally unacceptable. The district office must call the employing office to reverse the assignment before he or she gets to our schools. The Minister of Education has long said so. If the district office omits that, unfortunately it becomes a community task. Don't even show that person your school, house, etc. Show him or her the road back to the district office," said Mr Masiya.

Director for the Centre for Cultural Development Mr Herbert Pikela weighed in saying the teaching especially of Early Childhood Development classes required fluency in local languages as this helped pupils to grasp concepts quickly.

"Language of instruction at ECD level is mother language. There is no learning where learners can't comprehend the teacher's language," he said.

"There is this common belief that all children comprehend Shona. I learnt to speak Shona at Grade 3 level and what we experienced when we went to school in the 1980s must be avoided at all costs.

He added: "Our children must not be persecuted psychologically for nothing. It is not about the employment of somebody but the effective learning of our innocent pupils."

Chiredzi district schools inspector Mrs Petronela Nyange said the ongoing recruitments were sanctioned by Treasury and were being handled in Harare.

"So the recruitment you see now has been sanctioned by Treasury and head office does that. So we have been requesting that they consider our local language needs and that is when they agreed to recruit only teachers from our database.

"So now we at least got people that are normally resident in Chiredzi but now we are now at a stage where we need to check what indigenous language they can speak before they are posted," she said. "Of course, they also consider lots other criteria such as date they qualified. We don't often have enoughion our database making it on the cut-off dates for instance, hence some of the challenges. We also find that some whom we actually need have been posted elsewhere.

"Right now they are looking into removing criteria such as date completed training but under professionalisation the right qualifications and pedagogy for degreed college leavers is a must. This is the reason we cannot take those who did BA in Shangani without pedagogical qualification."