GREEN Party president Peter Sinkamba says increased hours of load have defeated the purpose of introducing an education television channel for pupils.

Recently, General Education Minister David Mabumba announced that the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) would open a channel dedicated to the provision of education during the closure of schools and beyond.

The new ZNBC channel will start on April 13, 2020.

But recently Zesco Limited announced that for the next 10 days, consumers would experience load shedding of up to 15 hours per day, citing a fault at one of the power producers.
And in an interview, Sinkamba said the formation of an education channel on ZNBC was ineffective as the country was still experiencing unprecedented load shedding.

“As we have said, the PF government is not operating like an octopus. An octopus is a creature that has so many legs and which appears to be moving in different directions but at the end of the day the creature will be moving on one direction. We have heard this issue that there will be load shedding for 15 hours and obviously, the load shedding for 15 hours will affect the whole country and naturally, the load shedding is going to be during the course of the day; we should expect students will not be covered by the education program,” Sinkamba said.

He said unless government fully resolved the energy crisis, the country would not achieve its educational goals.

“This used to work under Kaunda’s time, television communication, it used to work during Kaunda’s time because that time, there was no load shedding. Now it can’t function at all until such a situation that will sort out the load shedding issue,” said Sinkamba.

“We will definitely not achieve much in terms of the educational goals. The way it used to be during our time, the syllabus was informed to the whole country so you would know what topic would be taught on a particular day on a particular time. So with load shedding where particular areas are being load shedded, it is difficult to have those children learn at a particular same time unless they have gensets or solar systems which they can rely on. So we are challenged in that manner.”