The Sunday News
Munyaradzi Musiiwa, Midlands Correspondent
THE Government has employed 80 teachers to teach IsiNdebele in the Midlands Province to address the shortage of teachers in a number of schools whose communities predominantly speak the language.
There had been numerous complaints by parents in some parts of the province whose communities are predominantly Ndebele speaking that there was an imbalance on vernacular language teachers which resulted in some schools with IsiNdebele speaking pupils learning ChiShona.
Acting Midlands provincial education director Reverend Tedious Mativenga said the issue had been attended to.
“More IsiNdebele teachers were recruited to fill up the vacancies. A total of 80 posts were given. There was also a shortage in Science, Mathematics and practical subjects. We will be meeting the Permanent Secretary on Tuesday to finalise the process. As a province we had more than 1 000 teacher vacancies,” he said.
Midlands Province has also been allocated about 300 new teachers during the ongoing teachers recruitment exercise.
Rev Mativenga said the province had registered about 3 000 teachers who had applied to be employed. He said the 300 teachers were not adequate to fill in the vacant teacher posts in the province.
“We had an electronic registration exercise in all districts across the country. Those who were registering were asked to select two provinces.
We then collated the information in the province. As a province we registered about 3 000 teachers. The information was then sent to Harare where a team comprising people from all provinces then selected the teachers to fill in the vacant posts.
“As a province we were given 300 teachers, 140 of which are for infant, ECD and Grade One and Two. We have 1 100 schools and 800 are primaries. Gokwe has a high demand for teachers. We wanted 400 teachers in Gokwe North alone,” he said.
