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"speaker_name": "Mr. Poghisio",
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, please, protect me from the Front Bench on the other side. That being the case, it is only good that we begin to ask the Government to start now. We are lagging behind everybody else. A young country like Rwanda, which has gone through turmoil and other things, is ahead of us in Information Technology (IT). We are moving slowly. We cannot afford to go at the rate where we are begging the Government to recruit teachers to provide a basic service like primary school education. We are very big on free primary education as a name. The whole world is looking at us for that. What the world does not know is the rot; the difficulties of having to bring up the pupils in our public schools. I want to touch on something else. Our primary school teachers are now having to deal with so much funds as a result of free primary education, which are directed straight to the head teachers. Most of these teachers are very young people, who have no training on how to handle these funds. They are supposed to keep accounts, but they do not know how to keep those accounts. There is a lot of wastage. Money is being thrown to some of these young people. There used to be induction courses for teachers, so that they could actually handle money, but they do not get these courses any more. There is a lot of wastage in schools because head teachers are not trained on how to handle money. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, while the intention is to collect fees, the primary purpose of schools is to teach young people. Many times, teachers send away children to collect fees at the time of examinations, so that they can miss the examinations. It is like a punitive measure; if you do not have school fees, you do not do examinations. It is a very interesting way of fulfilling your duty as a teacher. 716 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES April 18, 2007 However, where students come from very poor areas like in the ASAL areas, I would like to challenge the Minister to start being creative in terms of working out how some of these students can belong to a category that can be given work for fees. We should have work study programmes, so that the students do not have to go home. A lot of work can be created around the schools, so that these children can work for their school fees. Another way is through the feeding programme, so that the Government gives food to those schools and that food is quantified into fees. That reduces the amount of fees charged in those particular areas to help the poor children, so that they can continue to study. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I look forward to a time when our education system will be in sync with educational systems in countries around us, so that we can have teachers coming from different countries to help us in cases where we have a shortage of teachers or our teachers going to those countries in case they have a shortage. In this case, there is no shortage of teachers in this country. This Motion is simply asking the Minister to ask for money from this House through the Budget, to employ enough teachers in the country to teach our children. I would like to thank hon. Ojode for reminding this Government of its basic duty. On teachers' transfers, some of the problems we are complaining about are basically organisational problems. The District Educational Officers (DEOs) sit in their offices every day, the whole year, yet you can find that just next door, one school has three teachers and the school next has about eight teachers. This is a matter of balancing the teachers. A district can agree that schools with Standard Eight classes should never have less than six teachers, for example. That should be distributed equally. The problems are occurring because the DEOs office is not doing its job. It is sleeping on the job. For example, in West Pokot District, the former district which I belonged to before the Pokot North District was created, you will find that in Kapenguria area, near the DEO's office, schools are over-staffed and just in the zone next door, schools are under-staffed. This is just a duty of re-distribution. I hope the Minister can impress on his DEO's to redistribute teachers without fear or favour. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}