The United Unemployed Educators will today picket outside Parliament over the unemployment of teachers.
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga recently told parliament that more than 30 000 posts are still vacant countrywide.
Motshekga said filling of vacant posts at schools is an ongoing process to ensure that there is no class without a teacher for all the grades.
The top three provinces with massive vacant positions are KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and Limpopo.
The Western Cape Secretary of the teacher’s movement, Mongikazi Zihlangu says, “This is what we did on the 7th of March, we went to the Department of Education to handover our memorandum of demands and then we met the director, Mr Allan Meyer and we gave him our memorandum, and then they did not give us any feedback until now. We’ve been sending them emails, calling them, they did not respond to us.”
Acting posts
Basic Education Department National Spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga says there are people acting in these posts and the posts are yet to be occupied permanently.
Mhlanga says, “In education whenever someone departs, someone will act in that position and then the position will be advertised and that’s a process that happens at any given time. So when the question came at the time it was asked, the Minister answered it in that way because, at that time, that was the number of posts that were still being processed, to get the people acting in those positions permanently employed.”
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Reporting by Zihle Mdanyana.
