Unemployed teachers are planning to stage a nation-wide protest over their longstanding demands pertaining to the recruitment of unemployed teachers.

They have also threatened to close down all Directorate of Education offices in the regions until their demands are met, the National African Students’ Association secretary general in the Kavango West Region Gellasius Kandunda told Nampa in an interview on Sunday.

The protest is planned for 28 November countrywide, he said.

‘We want to eradicate the percentage of unemployed graduate teachers in the education sector,’ he said.

Kandunda explained that the decision to protest was taken last year by different former student leaders who are unemployed.

‘We have been engaging different education offices and up to this year we even went up to the extent of engaging with the Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture directors in different regions. All these engagements did not give us the satisfactory responses that we are looking for,’ he said.

In the Kavango Eas
t Region, he said, the protest will start from the Rundu Sports Stadium with a march to the Kavango East Education Directorate office, where a petition will be handed over to the education director.

In the Kavango West Region, the protest will take place from the International University of Management in Nkurenkuru where teachers will then march to the regional education office.

‘After handing over our petition, we will ask the director to excuse himself from the office so we can close it,’ the student leader said.

In September this year, the unemployed teachers also held a press conference in Rundu where they claimed that 80 per cent of the understaffed schools in the country were in the two Kavango regions, where teachers have to cater to between 70 and 90 learners in a class. They added that 3 410 teachers are unemployed in the two regions.

This was challenged by the education ministry.

Source: The Namibian Press Agency