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Call to Nullify Teacher Hiring Rejected
- Details
- Published on Tuesday, 17 July 2007 22:58
The Government has indicated it will go by the list of those deemed to have passed the exercise, despite protests by the district education board.
Those who passed have been asked to fill employment forms, ready for posting, education sources said, yesterday.
The decision to reject the board's plea to have the exercise nullified elicited criticism from Kenya National Union of Teachers' officials and MPs Jimmy Angwenyi, Zebedeo Opore and Dr Hezron Manduku.
Knut chairman Geoffrey Mogire said: "What was the reason of empowering the board as a vetting authority in the exercise, only to ignore its recommendations."
The MPs maintained that the exercise should be repeated for the sake of fairness and transparency, and warned that they would lobby their colleagues against passing the Education ministry's budget, next month, if the interviews were not done afresh.
But Knut executive secretary David Mokamba, who was a member of the interviewing panel, said the decision to offer jobs to those short-listed was welcome.
"The decision has proved that accusations of favouritism and corruption were malicious, and it is shameful of our elected leaders to try to have the exercise nullified," he said.
He said complaints of bias were baseless, and asked those complaining to table evidence of irregularity to the Teachers Service Commission.
Education minister George Saitoti was quoted recently ruling out a repeat of the recruitment. He said all the 6,200 new teachers would be offered jobs, despite protests from various parts of the country.
Some 5,000 teachers would be posted to primary schools and the remaining 1,200 to secondary.
Meanwhile, a TSC official Joel Ngatiari, said the recruitment was carried out professionally, apart from a few genuine complaints about bias.
He said the exercise was successfully carried out in 95 per cent of the districts, except in a few where committees failed to follow guidelines.
The TSC was studying complaints from various districts and where the exercise would be found to have been irregularly done, a repeat would be ordered.
No complaints would have arisen if committees had followed the commission's guidelines faithfully, he said, when spoke to reporters in Embu during a prize-giving ceremony at Nguviu Boys Secondary School.
He praised the school for its high standards of discipline, and blamed the wave of unrest in some institutions on parents, who, he said, had abdicated their role of inculcating good values to their children, leaving it to teachers.
Secondary school students were in a critical stage of their lives and should not be left to teachers alone for guidance, since they needed careful moulding, he said.
