EDUCATION Minister Douglas Syakalima says government has put a lid on teacher transfers, unless in very special circumstances.

And Syakalima says the 2024 teacher recruitment exercise is still underway.

Speaking when he featured on ZNBC’s Sunday Interview, Syakalima said President Hakainde Hichilema was clear that people should stay in a place for at least four years before they seek a transfer.

He said this in response to a question about the confusion in the education sector of people working where they were not supposed to as well as ghost teachers.

“I think there’s an audit [into ghost teachers] going on [by] the teachers themselves. And some of these are legacy problems, so many problems, we had to rectify within a short period of time. But an audit is being carried out on the teachers. That confusion was horrible, the MP for Mulobezi said these teachers are not there, they don’t exist, and nobody can be transferred to those vacuums. The President said if you’re employed to go and work somewhere, you must spend at least four years there. If you don’t want to be there, why did you say you want to be employed? You want to be employed where there are already teachers? Again this is what is being audited,” Syakalima said.

“We’ve put a lid to say no one should move. Obviously there are exceptions, especially if it’s about medical problems. I have told my PS to make sure that they authenticate which doctor, because sometimes you may just go to the hospital and get a date stamp. You’re taken there to go and work, all of us came from rural areas, if I told you where I did my grade one, it was in a bush but in that bush, there was a teacher. Now don’t you think that those who used to teach me are so proud to see a person like me? This is what we say ‘you must be patriotic to your country’. They must stay there. If there was no teacher, was I going to be here? I’ve taught in universities for over 30 years, who made me that? It’s that teacher who began to teach me in grade one in a village. So teachers must be patriotic. Teaching is a noble profession”.

And Syakalima said the 2024 teacher recruitment exercise was still underway and the 2025 process would only commence once it was concluded.

“It was not really like pushing to the end. The process is ongoing because we had said first in first out, we cannot keep people just in the database and every time we advertise, they will not finish. We found 120,000 teachers on the street. When we offloaded 30, we came somewhere to 90. And some have been replaced so must be somewhere around 70. If we were recruiting 10,000 teachers every year, we wouldn’t have had that backlog. If the President did not say we will recruit teachers en mass, in the next 20 years…it was going to be a total crisis. For 2024, immediately they finish this, they will start with 2025,” he said.

“I’m so confident that by the time we go to 2026, we would have reached 48,000 or so. Is that looking like a miracle? It’s not a miracle, somebody had to think that this is what we are going to do. And as for me, the President has helped us as a country to be thinking, to be futuristic. Because when he was talking about free education, many people said ‘where?’.”

He said government had not yet met the one teacher to 45 pupils ratio.

“The pupil teacher ratio, we are doing fine because of the same numbers that we recruited. Obviously, we haven’t reached where we are supposed to be where you are supposed to have one teacher to 45 pupils. The President usually says it was a good problem, getting the children in school, then space, this is why he scaled up CDF. And I think that we are doing fine on building classroom blocks across the country but I think we haven’t reached that stage where you can say I’m very comfortable with it. Many people do not understand, so would you have these kids to be in the streets? It was going to be a menace for us in the next 20 years because we are going to be breeding criminals, vagabonds,” Syakalima said.

Meanwhile, Syakalima said there was no external influence in the change of the school curriculum.

“Nobody can come to arm twist you because it’s up to you to say that this is what we want. And government has put in a lot of money on this score and I don’t think anyone can arm twist you. This thing is not only for government, it was approved by the people, and it’s the people who are crying that change this curriculum. So now, if the people are the ones who wanted the new curriculum, no one can come and arm twist you, it doesn’t work like that,” said Syakalima.