Scores of Operation Dudula members have marched to the Gauteng Department of Education in the Johannesburg CBD to demand employment opportunities for locally qualified unemployed educators.
The protesters are also calling on the department to prioritise the placement of South African learners at schools. They accused the department of prioritising jobs and placements for foreign illegal nationals over South Africans.
Operation Dudula’s National Coordinator Thabo Ngayo addressed the protesters.
“We are unapologetic about that comrades, they can call us names or xenophobic. The law of this country is the law of country. We cannot allow lawlessness while we are watching. There’s those coming from other countries turning ours into a banana country. We can’t allow foreign nationals to do as they wish without even without proper documents to come and work in our country.
Gauteng MEC for Education Matome Chiloane says they will engage with Operation Dudula leadership to find common ground on issues raised in Dudula’s memorandum of demands.
The protesters are accusing the department for violating immigration laws by prioritising placement of foreign learners and employing foreign teachers while South Africans are neglected. Dudula has given Chiloane three weeks to adhere to their demands.
“I think it is crucial to have meeting with them. Firstly they said they’ve never met the department, so we will have a meeting with them. And by the time we meet, we would have been able to prepare a response to their memorandum. So we would be able to give them a listen,” says Chiloane.
VIDEO | Operation Dudula in Limpopo wants all foreign teachers fired:
Meanwhile, Operation Dudula in Limpopo marched to the offices of the Limpopo Department of Education in Polokwane and submitted a memorandum of demands.
On top of the list, offspring of undocumented nationals should not be admitted at public schools. There should be no financial assistance for learners whose parents are undocumented foreign nationals and teachers of foreign origin should not be employed by public schools.
“We have about 10 000 foreigners that are employed by the department of education nationally, so we know that our own are not getting jobs because the posts have been occupied by those foreigners,” says Operation Dudula Limpopo Secretary Grace Mamonyamane.
Authorities promised to respond to the demands in due course.
“Because the intention was to deliver the memorandum to the MEC as it is addressed to her, we will take the memorandum to her as a collective leadership, we will respond to the issues they are raising,” says Limpopo Education Department’s Naphtali Molope.
A stern warning to all government entities that the organisation has ever marched to.
“We want to send a clear message to the government, a clear message to all the ministers that are playing us for a fool in the parliament to say that Operation Dudula is recording every little thing that is happening in the country. Every memorandum that we are submitting to any department in the country, we are putting it on record – so that at the end of the day, we can pull all these demands and say what have we achieved from this government,” adds Mamonyamane.
The march is part of a nationwide programme that was scheduled to also take place in Gauteng, Western Cape and the Eastern Cape.
VIDEO | Operation Dudula marches in Soweto
Additional reporting by Pimani Baloyi.
