Yesterday a BEC advertisement was published calling for people to apply to be invigilators. This follows a boycott by teachers who are demanding that BEC pay them P150 per hour for invigilation and not P30 as currently offered. The teachers have also demanded that the chief invigilators who are headmasters be paid P10,000 and not P5,500 as offered by the examination council. BEC and the teachers unions have since had an impasse after BEC abandoned the negotiation talk of the working Memorandum of Understanding.
The Botswana Secondary Teachers Union (BOSETU) has stated that it is a crime for BEC to advertise for non-teachers to invigilate the exams. "Can you imagine what would happen if a person who is not a teacher is told to take control of a school, while the school head is there? Some of them may be retired officers who have never been in the teaching profession and this automatically puts the credibility of the examinations into question," BOSETU's deputy secretary general and chief negotiator Tobokani Rari said.
