Maputo, 23 Jul (AIM) – Mozambique’s Minister of Education, Carmelita Namashalua, on Monday assured journalists that the government is paying teachers for the overtime they have worked, but that each hour of overtime must be checked.
The payment is made, not by her ministry, but by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. The long delays in paying for overtime have infuriated teachers, leading to sporadic strikes.
“We are interacting with the Ministry of Economy and Finance”, said Namashalua. “We have teams working on this permanently and this money is being paid. We are receiving weekly information on the payment of overtime”.
But the hours of overtime must be checked, to ensure that they really were worked, and Namashalua asked teachers to be patient. At a meeting with the Ministry of Economy and Finance last week, she said, “we were informed that we are at the final stage of paying for the overtime worked in 2022, and the process of checking the overtime for 2023 will now begin”.
In other words, an entire year’s worth of overtime is still owed to the country’s teachers.
She blamed the problem on the shortage of teachers. Namashalua said the country is short of 16,000 teachers, who cannot be recruited because of budgetary constraints.
This was why the government demanded that the existing teachers work overtime and extra shifts.
“We are unable to hire teachers in accordance with our needs”, said Namashalua. “That’s why we have a deficit of 16,000 teachers in the system. It’s this deficit that creates overtime, and the government is well aware of this fact”.
Namashalua refused to answer questions about the delayed arrival of school text books for second grade pupils. These pupils are now in the second quarter of the school year and the promised books have yet to arrive.
The books could easily have been printed in Mozambique, but because of demands for an international tender, they are being printed thousands of kilometres away, in India.
Namashalua invited the reporters to her office on Wednesday, when she would answer this and any other questions they might have.
(AIM)
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