You may have never heard about NETO, a WhatsApp group, before the arrest of its leader. NETO is a WhatsApp group formed by jobless teachers. They were promised jobs if they opted for a teaching career, but now, after graduation, they have come to bitterly learn they were duped. This government has no intention of hiring them despite the shortage of teachers in the schools. This is their disturbing story.
I grew up in an era where teachers never became unemployed. Nursing, medical doctor, police and similar occupations were considered unemployment foolproof. Not any more! The focus of the CCM government is building schools, and after building them, it is to register students who find teacher shortage is a real blockade to the advancement of their academic ambitions. When CCM leaders inaugurate schools, they balloon costs of construction but seldom mention how many teachers have been recruited. Ornate school buildings are an end in itself!
These days, the quality of education is a source of consciousness for the very few. Most leaders have ensured they are overpaid to such an extent that their children study abroad, and therefore, they have lost interest in domestic education. The quality of education in Tanzania is dropping so alarming that the leadership seems eager to parade top-grade performance to obfuscate the downtrodden reality. Higher academic performance, totally divorced from the harsh reality, is on display to convey a misleading picture that our education is doing well while it doesn’t.
Many factors cause our education to lag behind international standards but shortage of teachers, books and sticking to outdated syllabuses lead the pack. Time after time, our educationists have promised a total overhaul of the education system but keep repeating the same mistakes again and again of reproducing the same content, albeit with different emblems. There is a focus on renaming syllabuses rather than dumping current syllabuses for the demands of modern society. The fancier the names of the syllabuses the more the excitement with total disregard of the content in those syllabuses.
Syllabus titulars are elongated to pretend the content has also changed, but the refurbished subjects are a culmination of rehashed unrelated topics that have been lumped together into renamed syllabuses. Textbooks continue to soldier on despite the rehashed syllabuses confirming our worst fears that the education reformists are entrapped by their own limited skills and knowledge. Educationists seldom consult potential employers or students themselves or the composition of the investigative committees never entertain the beneficiaries to boost the improvement of the quality of the intended products. The final product is a shilly-shallying whitewash, and the cloying sameness is recommended as a brand-new solution! Thereafter, champagnes popped up with bash parties of achievement garlanding the occasion, climaxed with the carefully documented reports handed over to the government for an exquisite implementation.
Reports after reports have indicated a gulf of skills and knowledge once compared to grades in the certificates. Certificates say one thing while the graduate behind the certificate fails to match up the flying colours that artificially blot out academic mediocrity. While few, for fear of reprisals, may be willing to come out and question why academic forte de force is not reflective of the graduates in question, it is now common knowledge academic certification is not what it used to be. Some question standardisation of results may be leaning to augment political whims rather than capturing the gospel academic forte.
With modern buildings in place, while teachers are not hired in sufficient numbers, this leads me to another concern of whether education is no longer a pillar of development since our leaders’ children do not study locally. Alternative thinking is whether it is by design local education is made poor in order to churn out semi-cooked graduates who may not have the critical analytical skills to challenge the excesses of the regime in power. Indeed, ignorance can sometimes be weaponized as a tool to subdue populations that otherwise could be agitating for meaningful reforms and have the dints and stamina to act upon them.
A proliferation of semi-cooked graduates has led to habitual parasites that, in Kiswahili, we call “chawa”, dominate our public life. These graduates have unashamedly named themselves “chawa” in order to claim a piece of national cake. The only time you know they have gone to school is when they trumpet their educational feats. Then you ask yourself why did they waste all those years to pursue tertiary education if the final outcome was to prostrate themselves before those with the means. What is conspicuous is that all “chawa” lack creative minds, rendering their education of no use.
Our unemployed teachers have formed their own WhatsApp group to share experiences and chart out a way forward that is, by necessity, had to be confrontational against the regime in power. Our leaders have been quietly crafting laws that apportion the largest part of the national cake to themselves. From salaries, perks, allowances, terminal benefits, and the like, now Tanzanian politicians are unrecognizable from the rest of us. As the scripture cautions, leaders must live according to the people they lead in order to be sensitive to the problems facing the people. Overpayment has insulated our leaders from this reality, and they can no longer claim representative democracy is working to our collective benefit. It is working for them, certainly, but not for us.
If all the excesses that our politicians and their supporting cast of principal bureaucrats are razed to the ground, we will have enough money to hire all the teachers we need. The shortage of teachers is artificial. It is being created because money which should be allocated to teacher employment is being looted to buttress the insane living of our leaders. Education is being funded in the infrastructure alone where there is also an opportunity to demand commissions. Therefore, our leaders, apart from apportioning the largest share of the budget to themselves, come back to squeeze hefty bribes in the name of education.
Authorities are growing nervous that this innocuous WhatsApp group, NETO, maybe a bristling fountain of challenging the establishment. Our history supports this growing apprehension. Most of our top politicians honed their political careers in teaching or unions. Teaching or a union career prepares an individual for the politics of resistance to agitate for a better tomorrow. This may explain why authorities work very hard to ensure puppets emerge as winners in the elections of teachers’ associations and unions. That approach has also infested the soccer federation.
When unemployed teachers began to organize themselves, rulers of the day felt nervous because of the injustices they inflicted upon their poor souls. Once they masquerade as unemployed teachers and join that WhatsApp group, the security forces identify the leadership for apprehension, harassment and subjugation. It is history repeating itself. When medical doctors asked for higher pay, security forces zeroed into their leadership, and Dr Ulimboka was kidnapped, beaten to a pulp and thrown in a forest in the forlorn hope hyenas would have the last word on his life. Thankfully and with a sigh of relief, our plans are not God’s, somehow the hyenas were innocent of the Dr. Ulimboka’s blood. He survived the ordeal only to die a natural death years later.
We know it was the security forces that did Dr Ulimboka in July 2012 because even the then president Jakaya Kikwete upbraided against them, albeit he wilfully brooked the perpetrators. Kikwete superficially repudiated security forces with these words: “….huyu Dr. Ulimboka alikuwa anapigania masilahi ya madakitari wenzie sasa mna sababu gani ya kumteka na kumpiga na kumtupa msituni……” Officiaĺly, Kikwete denied security forces were behind that brutal attack on Dr. Ulimboka. He said those doctors who were unhappy with their pay should resign. This broadside contradicted his own Premier Mizengo Pinda, who had formed a committee to resolve the impasse. To date, more than ten years later, medical doctors’ claims have not been addressed, but the hikes of senior politicians and civil servants have been smoothly and severally and without let-up!
Unemployed teachers claim they are not a political party but are shocked the government wants to disband them under the ruse of operating like an unregistered political party! The government has twice promised to hire a couple of thousands of teachers but developed cold feet because they have no interest in the welfare of our children. “Shule za Kata” has been paraded as a paragon of achievement of simplicity, cost-effectiveness and inclusiveness, but if you ask what it teachers student ratio is and how many children of the national leaders are attending them, OMG, the response you will get will shock you!
Read more analysis by Rutashubanyuma Nestory
I strongly agree, employ teachers rather than using police force to silence them.. it is like a bomb, soon it will go off.