Responding to questions in Senate on Thursday following the recent outrage over a wrongly spelt isiNdebele book, Primary and Secondary Education Minister Dr Lazarus Dokora criticised social media users for distorting information and fanning tribalism.
Said Dokora:
The cover of the book in question is written ‘Sekuthe Dlwe.’ Our experts informed us that there is nothing wrong with this. If you go to social media where this originated and is circulating, you will find that on this word ‘dlwe’ they added the letter ‘h’. To show you the misconception that the media has, they don’t mention the names of the authors but claim that they’re not Ndebele speaking people. The authors of these books are Maphosa, Ndudzo, Sebata Tumisani and Sigogo Nomalanga. That is the truth of the matter. I can say this is a rumour being spread by social media and we made investigations to know the truth. These books belong to a certain organisation and it was responsible for the writing up of those books. We have organisations which write these books and after that they are taken to our ministries. We have experts in our ministry who will inspect these books to assess if they can be used or not. When schools buy text books, they buy only those which are certified by this certifying department to be usable.
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