Teacher unions in Eastern Province have expressed scepticism on the pronouncement by government to recruit retired teachers to cushion the shortage of staff throughout the country.
Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT) Eastern Province Chairperson, Alakwisa Phiri, says the decision by government to recruit retired teachers will not be a lasting solution to the problem.
Speaking in an interview with ZANIS in Chipata today Mr Phiri said government should exhaust all the trained personnel by employing them and also improving its recruitment system and the number of training institutions.
Mr Phiri disclosed that currently there are a lot of trained teachers that are still waiting to be employed by government, hence engaging teachers that have retired will be unfair on them.He said since government is promoting youth employment in the country, the recruitment of retired teachers will deny qualified youths a chance of getting jobs.He expressed sadness that some teachers, who graduated as far as 2010, are still in the streets and have not yet been employed by the government.
Mr Phiri said the situation will impact negatively on the education standards especially in rural areas where the teacher-pupil ratio is still high.
He has since advised government to reduce the number of years for training primary school teachers from three to two years through reducing the bulk content of the course and expand and improve the existing infrastructures to take up more students.
Recently, Ministry of Education acting Chief Human Resources Management officer Stephen Siame, disclosed that the Ministry of Education will recruit retired teachers to cushion the shortage of staff country-wide.Mr Siame said the country is in dire need of more teachers, adding that teacher training colleges have failed to meet 5,000 net recruitment that has been put as a target for the ministry.
The recruited retirees, who must be below 65 years and have not served in administration, will be given a three year contract.
It seems this internet cafe attendant so called Mushota has lost his job or the cafe has been closed by the council for none payment of the operation fees. It is good that she will no longer cheat us with his PhD obtained from her village.
who run this lost country? we need a national development strategy in Zed to have a long term national plan, we need to deal with :education, health,agriculture, youth and enterpreurship/skill training, and the program shld be run by civil servant so that change of govt wont derail the strategy like in EU,USA.
Fed up of political cadre messing up this country, Chiluba messed now Sata, we not that dull zambians though not smart like people from developed world.
Am non bemba will they employ me young dynamic and have passion for my job always BA in education salary minimum 1400$
Government of the old by the old and for the old!!! They don’t care about the unemployed youths, they will use them at election time so they can wait.!! I thought all trained teachers are employed for them to think of recalling retirees kanshi there many unemployed trained ones???? Saaaaaad mwandini mweee!!!
ZNUT Chairperson Alakwisa Phiri may have misunderstood the explanation of Govt that the expected college turn of teacher graduate is 5000 annually, but the total number of colleges in Zambia are unable to produce 5000 teacher graduates annually, hence a need to recruit retired teachers to meet this shortage
I also would like to dispute the fact that there are teacher graduants of 2010th who have not been employed, because the Ministry of Education had been running adverts for teacher recruitment. Last year teachers were recruited twice in March and December. Why didn’t the 2010graduants apply for deployment?
Can Alakwisa give us the annual statistical figures of college graduants for him to argue convincingly?
What is the total number of unemployed graduate teachers?
The problem with most Zambian unions is that they are being run by people who are only interested in subscriptions from members. A serious union should keep figures for the numbers of graduates coming out of colleges and the numbers recruited by the government. Having figures for the teachers not recruited by the government is helpful rather than crying foul when you have no data to rely on. Most unions in other countries even run adverts to notify potential members if their are vacancies.
I dont get why pipe are complying about the Recruitment of retired teachers when in the first place you decided to put Forth a governmet full of oldes fit for the farm, now here you are crying just because they have decided to bring in they age mates. so please just live with it as you chose for yourselves and let us go to sleep VIVA UPND VIVA HH.
if there is teacher who completed schl in 2010 and not yet employed. i think h/she did fail
Imwe ba Alakwisa Phiri be objective give proof, howMANY teachers so far unrecruited? U shud have included such update then u wud have made yo statement credible as it is now yo statement is a chatterbox.