TSC now denies dishing out teaching positions to MPs
TSC chief executive Nancy Macharia dismissed the claims as media speculation
by MOSES OGADA
Audio By Vocalize
TSC CEO Nancy
Macharia
before the
Constititional
Implementation
Oversight
Committee
yesterday
/ENOS TECHE
THE Teachers Service Commission
has denied allegations that it has been
dishing out employment letters to
politicians.
TSC chief executive Nancy Macharia dismissed the claims as media
speculation, saying her office has
lived by the principles of recruitment.
Appearing before MPs, she said she
had “only been seeing the reports in
the media”, adding that there is no
truth to them.
“I read this in newspapers. It is giving TSC a bad name since we are the
ones mandated to recruit teachers,”
Macharia said.
She was responding to concerns
by lawmakers at the committee on
Constitutional Implementation led by
Runyenjes MP Eric Muchangi, alias
Karemba, that prominent people were picking employment letters from TSC.
“We have seen Cabinet secretaries with TSC employment letters at
funerals and churches. This doesn’t
augur well with the nation,” the MP
said.
“We are setting a bad precedent and
we have to bring the controversial
practice to an end. It is incumbent
upon all of us to deal with this problem as a country,” Runyenjes MP Eric
Karemba said.
At the meeting held in
Parliament on Tuesday, TSC flagged a
severe shortage of 98,261 teachers
in public schools.
This is besides the excruciating deficit of teachers for specialised subjects
that were introduced under the new
competency-based curriculum setting.
It is emerging that there are no
trained teachers in the country for
leather crafts, picture making, sculpture, jewellery, media technology and
woodwork.
There are also no qualified instructors for general science,
indigenous languages, as well as marine and fisheries technology.
Macharia said the shortage crisis has been worsened by the rollout of
junior secondary schools.
She added
that the crisis is expected to deepen
with the planned introduction of senior schools by next year.
The TSC
boss warned that without urgent
action, the growing deficit would
continue to undermine Kenya’s education system.
The committee was probing the
extent to which TSC has lived up to
its constitutional mandate.
Macharia said the teacher shortage problem has been compounded
by “rampant sporadic school expansions”.
The new institutions, she
added, are being established without
corresponding budgets for teacher
recruitment.
“TSC has not achieved the optimal
number of teachers since its establishment, hence the need for more
budgetary allocations,” she said.
She attributed the crisis to chronic
underfunding, which has hindered
efforts to meet staffing needs and
deliver quality education.
This was even as MPs raised concerns about the imbalance in the
distribution of teachers, with some
schools overstaffed as others suffer.
“Do we have parameters for setting
the number of teachers against the
number of students?”
Tongaren MP
John Chikati said.
He raised concerns that TSC has been recruiting
tutors who graduated recently to the
detriment of those who have been
unemployed for years.
“Why not
have programmes where teachers
are hired on the basis of their graduation dates?” the MP, who is also
Ford Kenya’s secretary general, said.
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