The Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT) has wondered why the trend of fake qualifications among teachers has continued despite efforts by sector players to curb the vice.

On Sunday, The Teaching Council of Zambia (TCZ) revealed that it has banned over 1,000 teachers from practicing after being found with forged academic and professional documents.

And in an interview, ZNUT secretary general Newman Bubala called for a continuation of the verification process so that the system is rid of bad eggs.

“This has been an issue; years back there was no one to detect, to say this is a fake qualification until TCZ came up with the verification process. It was at that time that people were realising that this is not a genuine paper and this is. But from that time, we expected people to stop and be able to say, ‘if I do the wrong thing, I will be caught’, now if people are continuing to do the same wrong things, then people want to continually justify wrong things. We thought after clearing processes, justice would have been done, so this is why we want to put forward that verification should continue so that we have clean people in the system and there is nothing wrong with the verification as long as there is justice to it,” Bubala noted.

“It’s just important that the teaching service do their job and the council also do their job but one would wonder whether we still have this process of fake teachers because its denting the name of the profession.”

Bubala, however, urged affected teachers who felt they had been wrongly accused to appeal the action.

“So if the issue is that the process goes through the head master and verification starts and someone is found to have faked results, for us as a union, there is no defence for such. We have talked a lot about this but if there are teachers who believe that they have been taken wrongly, there is also the Teaching Service Commission appeal where a member who believes that he has been fired illegally when they have got correct papers, can appeal and those appeals, where they have been genuine, they have been attended to,” said Bubala.

“So what is key is that there is no room for fake teachers but if one feels infringed on, they can also appeal through the unions. If it is genuinely fake results, that one there is no defence, one should just justify why they should be in the system even when they don’t qualify.”