teacher
Swapna Prabhakaran
Durban maths teacher Busi Mzimela is paid her salary every month, despite the fact that she has not set foot inside a classroom for more than 18 months.
Mzimela says she stopped teaching last April after a disagreement about her post at Ntwenhle High School.
With several degrees behind her name, Mzimela had been doing her masters degree when she was approached and “recruited” for Ntwenhle by an education circuit inspector.
“I was told there was a school that needed someone like me,” she says.
In October 1995, Mzimela was introduced to Ntwenhle High as new deputy principal, and “the best mathematics teacher in the whole of KwaZulu-Natal”, she remembers.
Within days, however, she realised something was seriously amiss at the school. “I found the teachers were unco- operative or just absent. Six or 10 teachers were absent every day.
“One day in October I walked into the staff room and found all the teachers rewriting the pupils’ reports from June, because they said the children’s parents had complained about them.”
She says that, after her own investigations, she discovered that there was a severe shortage of teachers, and there were some subjects that were not being taught at the school.
“I went to the principal and asked him what should we do about the subjects which have no teachers. He answered: `We are used to that, we just make up those marks on the reports.'”
She says she also found out that any pupil who failed an exam was given 20 extra marks so that they could pass, making the school’s pass rates look better.
Over the next year, Mzimela says she tried to implement changes in the way things worked, requesting more teachers, trying to reorganise the exam structure and school timetables.
She believed she was working in her capacity as deputy principal but to her shock she found out six months after she’d been working there that her application forms for the post had not even been processed.
When she finally was given notice of appointment to the school, she found she had been taken on as an assistant teacher, a junior post with a salary several notches lower than what she had been earning at the University of Zululand where she had been a lecturer a few years before.
Her entanglement with bureaucracy began there, with a clash over her salary and her status. A few months later she was given a letter from the school’s committee telling her she was “no longer needed” at the school, because of her disruptive influence.
KwaZulu-Natal education representative Mandla Msibi says the problem lies with Mzimela and not with the department.
“We investigated, and then we did offer her secondment to other schools but she did not accept the post. She wanted to go back to that same school. If she really wants to teach, why doesn’t she accept another job?” Msibi says.
The department has recently begun rigorous scouring in all KwaZulu-Natal schools for corruption, weeding out ghost teachers and teachers with fake qualifications.
On Wednesday 12 educators appeared in Durban’s regional court on charges of fraud, and on Friday seven more will appear for corruption totalling R2,5- million.
Msibi says the department has not heard Mzimela’s serious allegations about fake report cards and absentee teachers at the high school before. “If she is willing to give us the information in a written form, we will investigate,” he said.