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{
"id": 297914,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/297914/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Kiunjuri",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Public Works",
"speaker": {
"id": 175,
"legal_name": "Festus Mwangi Kiunjuri",
"slug": "mwangi-kiunjuri"
},
"content": " Mr. Speaker, Sir, I also stand to support this Bill on the establishment of the Teachers Service Commission (TSC). Noting that I am also a teacher by profession, I think this is one of the good things that will happen to the profession. It is equally important that we will establish this independent Commission; we will bring the right things first. Today, we have already placed the horse before the cart by the fact that we have already addressed ourselves to issues concerning and affecting primary schools teachers and high school teachers, but we have forgotten that the foundation of everything is very important. Even the foundation of this Parliament is important. Mr. Speaker, Sir, if we have primary school going children who never attained proper background at the early childhood development (ECD) level, it will become useless to those children. Some of those children will never catch up. This is because they will never be able to attain what they missed at the foundational stage throughout their eight years of primary education. The point here is that as we go recruiting secondary school teachers, we must ensure, first of all, that the early childhood education (ECE) is taken seriously, because that is the foundation. If this child will go Standard Two or Three and he did not get any background, we will be doing a disservice to most of those primary school going children. I would propose that it be mandatory that all teachers at the ECD level be properly trained and given the right facilities. The reason why your son and my son, your daughter and my daughter are doing very well when they get to primary school is because we give them very a firm background in Pre-primary I, Pre-primary II and Pre-primary III. In the rural areas a child will go to pre-school for few months and then join primary school. We should give those teachers attention. I am happy that this year’s Budget addressed that question, but not adequately. What they are giving is a drop in the ocean. Mr. Speaker, Sir, when it comes to remuneration of teachers, you can imagine that today, police officers are earning more than teachers. I do not say that they do not deserve salaries. We have other professions that earn better than teachers. If you look at the standards, which are well articulated here, how do you attain standards if this teacher is supposed to walk for ten kilometers to school, because the primary schools cannot afford staff housing? The teachers are supposed to walk another ten kilometers back to where they come from. There is no transport and teachers in most cases will get to school two hours late; instead of getting to class at 8.00 a.m., they will get there at 10.00 a.m. It is important for this Commission to address the working standards of teachers. Issues of sanitation, water and roads should also be addressed. When this Commission is set up, those are some of the things it will look at. Other issues that also come with standards is the issue of the condition of the child in classroom. For example, in semi-arid and arid lands (ASALs), a child gets to class; he has not fed for the last two days and you expect the child to concentrate. It is also equally very important that we look for a way to improve conditions, for example, through the feeding programmes, when it comes to children going to school in ASAL areas. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the Government is already doing very well and wants to establish special schools. However, they are not facilitating them. It is once again the work of the CDF to go ahead and make sure that classrooms are available. Yes, we can set up classrooms, but what about teaching aids? That is why the Commission should concentrate on those things. It should not just look at how much salary is going to be earned. When it comes to appointment of commissioners, this is not just with the TSC. You get a situation where if you want to appoint commissioners from the regions only one or two constituencies benefit from all the appointments. Even if you want to have balance in appointments, we should look at the already existing Commissions and where the commissioners come from. This way, we can go back to counties; for example, we should not have Rift Valley with more than 11 counties but all appointments are made from one county. We do not want to have a situation where you say you are appointing people from Central Province yet all the appointments come from the same county. Somebody will come here and tell us we are balanced. However, by the end of the day, names are just floated and lobbying is done. Even those who will be shortlisted are predetermined. Those are the issues that we must look at; we want distribution. When it comes to the employment of teachers, it is very unfortunate that there are some areas in this country where those who graduated from universities and teacher training colleges 17 years to 20 years ago are still at home. They have not been employed. Why? Everything uses the quota system. You get some areas in which those who graduated last year are already waiting to join the TSC. They are already assured of employment, while other people who graduated 20 years ago are still at home, and have no hope at all of being recruited. For example, in my county and it is not the only one, we have so many of the teachers yet we have not yet been able to employ teachers who qualified in 2000. Other areas that I know of like Nyeri, we still have teachers who qualified in 1993 who are not yet employed. But if you go to other areas, teachers coming out of colleges are ready to join the profession. There must be a way of looking at it and balancing it. Even if we want to go the quota system, we must take care of all those people. Being at home for 20 years means you will retire before you even join the profession. If you qualified at the age of 30 to become a teacher and 20 years down the line you have not been employed, today you are 50 years and you are not serving any purpose, you are only frustrated. So, it is important that those things should be addressed when this Commission comes into being."
}