The 98% isssue – Motshiingilisa omuna ongandu

So 98% of Namibia’s teachers are not literate in the English language, why the surprised faces? This is something that has been known for a long time. But in typical Namibian fashion it sparked frenzy, Newspapers were bombarded with letters and texts, facebook lit up like a Christmas tree and Twitter was inundated (add to your vocabulary and look it up)with tweets poking fun at Namibian teachers poor level of English. The fiasco went as far as taxi drivers hurling unkind comments at teachers (trust taxi drivers to rub salt in fresh wounds).

Man of the moment Hon. Abraham Iiyambo (no relation, unfortunately), stepped up to the plate as he has done all year to explain that these tests were not meant to fail the teachers but to attain accurate data on their level of English, so as to necessitate their placing in additional English training programs (are you still with me or should I repeat slowly?). 

The bravest man in the Namibian government

So many fingers are being pointed at Hon. Iiyambo, but seriously what do we expect him to do? The man is a trained in fisheries and marine biology, he’s not a miracle worker. Yet again we are laying the blame at the door of the wrong person. All these problems are issues that he has inherited from his predecessors; they must tell us how they allowed the problems to escalate to this level. Citizens Mbumba and Angula must explain why they sat on the problems for so long, why they refused to listen when experts (who they paid) told them to fix the system. Why they created a mess and dumped it in Hon. Iiyambo’s lap, what do they think he is; a cleaner? These kinds of problems are gona keep popping up as the incumbent self enrichment deadwood leave office, leaving behind a tangled mess for the educated few, who are reduced to just being the cleanup crew.

I personally don’t blame the teachers (they get peanuts, and the kids have no manners these days), what they teach is what they learned while in school. The system is to blame and it is the system that needs to be fixed before we start pointing fingers. The Namibian education system will only work if we strengthen the base: early childhood and primary school. From that we can build, teachers are products of the system; so maybe we should point fingers at those who taught them? Why Citizens Mbumba and Angula did not implement training programs for the instructors who taught our teachers is another point they must answer (sometimes I wonder what they did while they were in charge of education).

On the flipside, I think we all need to calm down. Just because I can’t spell Pythagoras’s theorem does not mean I can’t solve it. I had classmates in high school that couldn’t spell or pronounce the word “molecule” but they still made me look stupid with my perfect pronunciation by tutoring me on chemistry. So unless you’re an English teacher then I don’t think you need to be worried. Of course if my kid comes home from school saying “morecure” instead of “molecule” then I might become slightly aggrieved but i won’t  dispatch myself down to the school to blame the teacher, heck no! As long as he/she knows the structure of the molecule, the rest I can help him/her with my perfect pronunciation. After all many of us forget that we as a society have a role to play in the education of our children by taking a keen interest and being helpful mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts.