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"speaker_name": "Mr. Khamasi",
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"content": "Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me a chance to contribute on this Vote. I would, first of all, like to congratulate the Minister for Education for the manner in which he moved the Vote. Looking at all the Ministries and the way they work, I think you can single out the Ministry of Education as one of those that are working Ministries. They have tried to deliver. We have seen quite big strides in this sector and we welcome most of them. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, service delivery in this Ministry is something we need to talk about. I would expect that the Ministry be in the forefront of, at least, replying letters. This is something that is not coming from this Ministry. Even if we, as hon. Members of Parliament, write letters to this Ministry nobody acknowledges even the receipt of the letters. This is particulary pertaining to some complaints in some schools in our constituencies. Occasionally, we write directly to the Minister and the Permanent Secretary, but we never get responses. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, at one stage in this House, when the Minister was in some sort of \"leave\" before he came back, we agreed that when teachers in whatever category; primary or secondary, retire, die or resign, there should be immediate replacement. However, it appears as if it was just rhetoric. It was an answer to please this House and nothing happens. Teachers retire, die or 2618 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES July 18, 2007 resign. However, it takes a long time before you hear the Government employing 6,000 or 7,000 teachers. They call them \"new\", but effectively, it is just replacement of teachers who have gone away through retirement, resignation or death. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other thing I would like to say about the distribution of new teachers who are normally employed, we require fair distribution. I normally sit in the District Education Board (DEB) in my district. We make resolutions. Unfortunately, for the last one year, the resolutions made in our DEB were completely ignored by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC). What did we see? Unfair interference. By the end of the day, we got names from the TSC of teachers who were not from Kakamega District. That was something we complained about, but it just died. Somebody needs to check and find out exactly what happened. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, in districts, we have constituencies and divisions. There are unemployed qualified teachers in these divisions and districts. It is unfair to get teachers from only one constituency and district being posted to all four constituencies in a district. These are some of the criteria which the DEB looks at. We say that, \"this constituency has its own qualified unemployed teachers.\" They need to take some of the teachers and have them teach in that particular constituency, division, et cetera . But what happens? The TSC says; \"No! That is not the criteria. The criteria is, anybody in that district who qualifies--- You will find one division producing teachers for the entire district. That is unfair because we are also dealing with unemployment. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to take this opportunity also to commend the Ministry for paying teachers their arrears well before the agreed date. This is commendable to the Ministry. We trust that teachers will now put in more effort to do their work well. I want to request the Government, \"let us not commit ourselves to things that we cannot be able to achieve.\" This is a problem carried forward. I believe it was unnecessary and we should be able to let whatever commission it is that will be doing exactly what we can be able to do. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to comment on management of high schools. There is high handedness of chairmen of Board of Governors (BOGs) in some schools that are in our jurisdiction. In my constituency, there are few cases where chairmen of BOGs literally refuse to accept teachers transferred to their schools. This is because they would prefer teachers being transferred away from the station to remain. The reasons are very well known to them. They literally go ahead and even refuse to hold meetings of Board of Governors (BoGs), until a school comes to a halt while the Government watches. Those influential chairmen of BoGs have literally compromised District Education Officers (DEOs) and Provincial Directors of education (PDEs) in their endeavour to frustrate teachers. I wonder why the Ministry should not intervene immediately and make sure that such things do not happen in our schools. It is wrong and immoral for a teacher who has been transferred to a school to be subjected to frustrations for no mistake of his or her own. The Ministry should check that and make sure that it does not occur. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, lastly, because of time, I want to thank the Ministry for introducing free tuition in our secondary schools. However, I would have thought that, perhaps, those funds could have been used well to streamline our primary education, where we do not have enough teachers, classrooms, etcetera . One would want to understand that, perhaps, this is an election year and that is why we are jumping on doing things nusu nusu - half half - before we refine what is already there. Otherwise, I would have thought that we could have used those funds to refine our free primary education. With those few remarks, I beg to support this Vote."
}