One September morning in 2013 I was walking into my office
building in Lilongwe when I noticed a huge crowd swarming around the notice
board. My office is located inside a district education office, and teachers
visit on a daily basis. But the young people crowding around the notice board on
this day were not teachers.
They were prospective student teachers. They had
applied for openings in the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) teacher education
programme, and had come to find out if they had been selected. This district
office was the nearest centre they could visit to find out their results. Some of
them had walked long distances on foot, others had used their hard-earned money
to come by public transport.
I went on twitter and asked if there were computer
programmers who could come up with mobile phone applications that would save
these teachers long kilometres of walking or hundreds of kwacha for transport.
A number of programmers expressed interest in the idea, and we agreed to meet. Using
Facebook, we extended the invitation to teachers, and two female teachers
joined our meeting.
We held our second meeting a few weeks ago. We met at the
school where the two female teachers teach. Out of twenty teachers on the
school’s staff, nine attended. The purpose of the meeting was to learn from the
teachers what kinds of solutions they would like to explore with the use of
technology, using mobile phones or computers, to make their classroom work
easier. I was in for a bit of a surprise.
Although it is located a short drive from the centre of the
city of Lilongwe, in a relatively wealthy, medium-density location, this school
has never had electricity in its entire nineteen-year history. Needless to say,
there is not a single computer at the school. Nothing surprising there. Having
become a ubiquitious feature in classrooms in wealthier parts of the world,
computers are non-existent in classrooms in poor countries such as ours.
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| A Primary Education Adviser supervising a teacher |
While each of the nine teachers who came to the meeting had
a cellphone, only one was able to go on the Internet. She was the only one on
Facebook. The majority of the children who attend the school are those of
maids, garden boys, guards and other menial workers. The children of the
residents of the area go to expensive private schools.
It soon became pointless to talk about educational
technology for classroom use, so the meeting turned into a free-for-all session
in which the teachers let loose about their anger and frustrations:
Teachers in rural areas receive hardship allowances, but we in
urban areas have worse hardships. The little salary we get goes to paying for minibuses
or kabaza. We have too many children for one teacher. Too much record-keeping
we have no time to prepare lessons. Rents are very high in cities.
We have served for eighteen years without a promotion. The
few that get promoted wait for two years before their new salary is effected. When
we try to go the ministry to enquire all receive are insults. Newer teachers are
being promoted before our very eyes. No loan scheme. No medical scheme. I have
bad lungs from inhaling chalk dust I need expensive specialist medical care
twice a year and I can’t afford it. Reforms are imposed on us by senior
officials who copy things from abroad where they go and eat fat allowances.
We can’t even attend workshops locally. We
introduce new ideas and others take credit for them. We nurse sick children,
tend to injured students, handle blood, settle cases amongst students. Nurse,
judge, teacher, all in one, no recognition. Now they are bringing the community
to come and monitor us. Parents are entering classrooms and demanding to see
our lesson plans and other records. . .
The first time I got a sense of how sore with anger Malawian
teachers are was in 2004. I was doing field work, and I spent seven months
talking to primary school teachers about conditions of their work. On my first
day with these teachers in 2004, I had set aside two hours for the teachers to
open up and describe the conditions in which they work. They were unstoppable.
We spent the entire day on the topic, and they were only getting started.
Fast forward ten years, and the anger feels as raw as it
felt in 2004. I realised, ten years ago, that our teachers have so many issues
they keep bottled inside them and they are hungry for a chance to air them out.
That is exactly how the teachers I met recently felt also. The past ten years
have changed nothing in the way our teachers feel about the conditions of their
work. They feel not only hopeless and helpless, they are convinced that nobody
cares about their plight.
Even after I had explained twice that I had come during the
lunch hour because I was not visiting them in any official capacity as I did
not work for government, nor was I visiting them on behalf of the NGO that I
work for, it did not matter. When I explained that my hope was for us to
discuss things that we could do for ourselves as teachers, rather than waiting
for someone to come and help us, I got some nods of agreement.
One thread that ran through the issues the teachers raised
was one of disempowerment. They feel powerless to change anything. As if they
have not had enough disrespect and disempowerment from everyone else, parents are
now being empowered to come into the classroom and demand to see the teacher’s
lesson plans. This is the lowest things can go, they said. Did they spend two
years in college and ten years in the classroom only to end up reporting to a
semi-literate parent who knew nothing about teaching? This they cannot take.
It was at this point that it started dawning on me the extent of the problem of accountability and class in this country. We are a highly segmented and class-divided country we refuse to be accountable to anybody we consider to be beneath us. This is a common human trait, and we are no exception. But our moral institutions have become too weakened to provide any framework for accountability to people we are expected to serve. If they are beneath us, they have to bow down to us, not the other way round. More problematic is that our political leaders excel at the rhetoric of humility when they fully know that in practice they expect us to worship them.
This is why many Malawians are pessimistic about the
prospects of anything coming out of the on-going cashgate investigations. It is
probably what was going on in the minds of those who partook of cashgate loot.
With nobody to be accountable to, what was there to fear? This was best
expressed by Watipaso Mkandawire in response to the article titled ‘Kudya Nawo: How Cashgate Became aMindset’ (The Lamp, February 2014
issue; also posted here).
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| Student Teachers from a DAPP TTC |
Mkandawire argued that graft, greed and corruption were
human problems that occurred even in countries where inequality is not as
pronounced as it is in Malawi. “Our main enemy in Malawi,” wrote Mkandawire in
a comment, “is our inability to create and maintain governance systems and
enforcement [mechanisms] of those systems.”
He went on to give the example of how in countries where governance
systems are observed and respected, being caught over-speeding or drink-driving
results in a penalty. In Malawi, you can palm-grease the traffic police officer
and get away with no penalty.
A society in which the teachers think of themselves as being
at the bottom rung of the social ladder is a society in danger of cannibalising
itself. If teachers cannot feel appreciated and see the rewards of hard work
and dedication, they cannot teach hard work and dedication to their pupils. If
a society cannot decide what values to inculcate in their children, and demonstrate
those values in deed, that society cannot offer much inspiration to the next
generation.
Note: A version of this article appeared in the Malawi News edition of Saturday 8th March, 2014
