|
|
|
|
| Columns |
| My Diary |
|
by
Steven Nhlane, 24 February 2007
-
09:06:47
|
Torturing teachers; welcome Media Council
An agreed agenda or lack of it was the cause of a premature adjournment of Parliament this week. It is sad that Parliament which last met in August last year could not agree on a clear agenda ahead of its meeting. This is total lack of preparedness.
Fingers are likely to point at two bodies as having failed to do their homework. The first group is the Business Committee of Parliament, composed of all leaders of political parties represented in the House and chaired by the Speaker. What was it doing? Why did it fail to thrash out an agenda?
The second is the Executive arm of government which has an obligation to serve the taxpayer efficiently and effectively at all times.
Whatever was done or not done, it is clear there was no agreement on what agenda to take to the august gathering. Which should serve as a warning for serious problems the House is likely to face during the whole sitting. One thing that is out of question is that this is clearly how not to conduct Parliamentary business.
The main reason the Business Committee must meet and agree in advance on the agenda is because money is always in short supply. If we had all the money we need, there would be no need to worry about what things to prioritise out of a long list of relevant others. My intuition is that there is mistrust between the Executive and members of the opposition which makes the former play hide and seek on the latter. In short, the two are peddling different agendas and are always pulling in different directions.
But that is normal. Where there is a group, there is likely to be conflict and power-play. But it is in situations like these that good leaders will single themselves out and work towards minimising mistrust among the members and bargain for a win-win situation. That is the challenge the Speaker as chairman of the Business Committee faces. That is also the daunting task my friend Henry Chimunthu Banda as leader of government business in the House must be prepared for at all times.
Talking about trust, I want to congratulate the various stakeholders behind the resuscitation of the Media Council of Malawi. I know a lot still remains to be done, but the spirit of voluntarism and loyalty—the two cornerstones on which the Council will be built—seem to be strong this time around. The Media Council failed previously because it did not have the support of the players. This was because few people who thought were captains in the media industry thought they had the moral high ground to take the lead and make everybody else follow them. The idea to have a regulatory body was good but it failed on implementation.
Key for its success will be the extent to which media houses support it. Its success will also largely depend on how widely it consults and involves the media houses in its formative, storming and norming stages. I reckon one of its main challenges will be accreditation. Who gets accredited, for example? Not an easy question.
Last but not least, I feel sorry for all teachers in primary and secondary schools as well as those in teacher training institutions, who are owed thousands of kwacha by the ministry of education for so many years now.
I know this is a very sensitive issue and Minister of Education Anna Kachikho would be among those who would not want me to talk about the issue here. But I have this to tell her that I have received a number of complaints and requests from teachers across the country who want the ministry to pay them their money. Perhaps, more importantly, they want the honourable minister to stop making noise on the issue when she has nothing to say.
Most of the teachers say that everytime the issue of salary arrears comes up, Kachikho makes the usual tired statement that government is looking into the issue and will pay the teachers. This, they say, is rubbish. It only demoralises them.
There is this teacher who came to my office this other day and showed me how inhumanely he has been treated during the past five years. He was promoted sometime in September, 2003, but he was only told about the good news after exactly 12 months. That meant the ministry had to pay him arrears accruing from his higher pay. He has not seen any of that money to date.
Six months down the line, the ministry wrote to him that he was a ghost worker and therefore there was no pay for him. He was not paid for three months. How he came to be a ghost worker after working for the ministry for 17 years, nobody has explained to him. His name was put back on the ministry’s payroll, but to date he has not seen a kwacha of that money.
As if that was not enough, in 2005, for no apparent reason, the ministry cut his salary by two-thirds. For six months, he was getting a third of his pay. Reason? No one has explained to him why. He eventually started getting his full pay, but he is still waiting for his arrears. In total, the ministry owes him about K210, 000 in unpaid arrears. For a teacher that is a lot of money.
But this teacher says it is more painful to him when he hears Kachikho telling the nation the ministry is doing something about the arrears. He says the minister is lying and had better shut her mouth on the subject.
I know that there are thousands of teachers that are in the same pathetic situation and that the ministry needs hundreds of millions of kwacha to pay out as arrears. The challenge for Kachikho is to scale up her bargaining powers and raise this money from Treasury.
But the message from the teachers is that Kachikho should stop talking carelessly on the matter.
—Feedback: stevenhlane@yahoo.co.uk
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
