The BDP doesn't care about the sorry state of our education
Phenyo Butale | Wednesday September 18, 2019 11:02
You can name them, dilapidated infrastructure, no teaching materials, living conditions of teachers are an insult to the teaching profession. Consequently, results are, to put it mildly, terrible.
All the problems are really a result of neglect of the education system by the BDP. The national pass rate for the past 10 years under the negligent BDP government has been plummeting and there is no sign that the situation will change any time soon. Our schools score a ‘pass rate’ of less than 50%, and the BDP government calls it an improvement.
Now, a blunder by President Mokgweetsi Masisi is going to cost our children, even more. Exams that were scheduled for the 23rd to the 24th October 2019 have been moved to 3rd and 4th October 2019. This essentially means that exam dates have been moved up the schedule by at least 20 days.
This move will seriously compromise the performance of these students because already the system subjects them to hardships. It is well known that students go to their final exams ba sa hetsa syllabus. What more now when you make them write a whole 20 days earlier? It is unfortunate that even those who may have finished the syllabus early to allow enough time for revision will now be disorganized by this decision.
Another unfortunate fact is that teachers who are supposed to invigilate these exams will be overstretched because they will have to balance preparations for the invigilation with the race to finish the syllabus on time. Already the process of finishing the exams is disturbed, because most of the people running the elections (election officers), are teachers anyway.
One can only wonder if President Mokgweetsi Masisi knew that the date he announced as an election day, coincides with exam dates, and if he knew why did he still go ahead and make the elections mid-week instead of the normal weekend?
These are the injustices that the New Botswana is fighting against. We cannot afford to have a government that is run on reckless decisions that affect the future of this nation.
Alliance for Progressives' (AP) proposal is that, these exams be postponed to later after elections, certainly not before.