The teachers embarked on a demonstration to voice out their frustrations and deliver a petition to the Minister of Labour and Home Affairs Major General Pius Mokgware. Their grievances include unpaid salaries and unrenewed temporary contracts.
The protesters, led by Thabang Kopelo, stated through their petition that they have three demands which advocate taking a leap of faith in Batswana instead of foreign nationals.
"This is a petition to the urgent attention and action on the employment practices in the Botswana education sector. "Our petition outlines three core demands that we are to deliver to you. One, we want urgent legislation to ensure that at least 80% of Botswana teachers are employed in private schools," he said.
"Our second is that we demand the cancellation of work permits that were given to foreign nationals and the suspension of further issuance of new work permits; we call these immediate cancellations and revocations of those work permits."
Kopelo highlighted that this is a strategy that government could adopt to notch down the unemployment statistics as he stated that foreign teachers are hired in high numbers compared to local teachers. He, however, pointed out that they aren't trying to be xenophobic but want to see Batswana being able to put food on their tables. The other demand was for the government to ensure that teachers are paid their dues and improve their salaries as some of them haven't been remunerated for months.
"Lastly, we demand proper payment and enforcement of compensation to Botswana teachers in public and private schools. We don't want to sound like a broken record, there are people that haven't been paid even their salaries," he said. The protesters urged Mokgware to urgently deal with their cries or they will come back to the ministry to voice out their frustrations.
"The honeymoon phase is over, you must walk the talk and if you don't act we are coming back," he said. In response to the aggrieved protesters, the minister revealed that they have already settled one of their demands. "Recently we have stopped issuing out work permits to foreign national teachers. We have so far rejected 140 applications to date," he revealed. On other issues, Mokgware urged the teachers to listen to the Budget Speech scheduled for February 3 to hear most of their issues being addressed.
Meanwhile, the new Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Tshokologo Kganetsano, told the Local Government budget pitso on Friday that payment of temporary teachers was one of the issues he had already encountered as a request for funding. Kganetsano moved from being the Bank of Botswana deputy governor to the ministry recently.
"I have two weeks having moved from the Bank of Botswana to the Ministry of Finance and I'm not getting any sleep," he told the Pitso. "Even now the phone was ringing with requests for funding and you listen and know these are important requests, but the funding is not available. "Before schools opened, I had a telephone call with the Ministry of Education who said they had temporary teachers whose contracts ended in December. "The Ministry said schools were reopening and they need these temporary teachers, but we don't have money. "The answer was that 'I hear you but there's no money'".
The Finance Ministry expects the 2024-25 financial year to produce a budget deficit of over P18 billion, up from the original forecast of P8.7 billion, due mainly to the continuing weak sales of diamonds.
