The Silobela community has rejected non-Ndebele-speaking teachers deployed by the government to take early childhood development classes in Donsa-Donsa, a predominately Ndebele area.
Donsa Councillor Willard Moyo said accommodating the teachers would do no good for the infant learners.
He was speaking at a recently held Zibagwe Rural District full council meeting. NewZimbabwe cites him as saying:
In my Ward there was a need for two Ndebele teachers for ECD.
We managed to identify qualified teachers from the area and recommended them to the ministry. However, we were shocked to learn that the two ladies were deployed elsewhere, one was deployed in Gokwe and another one in Zvimba and we are failing to understand why the government did that.
We were shocked that government sent Non-Ndebele speakers to take the ECD classes.
We rejected them and sent them back to the ministry. That move is killing our language and culture. ECD is a foundation in terms of education and learners at that stage need to be taught with people who are conversant in their own mother language.
Councillor Emmanuel Sibanda said there was a similar problem in Kwekwe where Ndebele-speaking teachers were deployed in the District, a predominantly Shona-speaking community.
Kwekwe District Schools Inspector Herbert Maziriri said while, he wanted learners to be taught in their mother languages, his hands are tied as the deployment of teachers is now centralised as it is being done in Harare.
Some have long attributed poor results in Matabeleland schools to the deployment of Shona-speaking teachers in the region.