Terrifying incidents at schools around the country has resulted in a call for staff to be allowed to carry guns at school.
A recent incident that has highlighted the vulnerability of educators involves school principal Lucy Lushaba (47) who was shot dead over the festive season.
Lushaba, of Tiboneleni primary school in Daantjie tribal trust, had stopped at the school to check that everything was in order over the holidays. ‘It’s illegal for teachers to carry guns to school but we want to know why the education department won’t allow us to follow the trend of other institutions that let employees keep weapons in safes on the premises,” says Shamba Mthembu, South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) general secretary .
According to Sadtu about 40 teachers in Mpumalanga were either hijacked or robbed while on duty last year.
Mthembu called for full-time security guards to be employed at schools and said the current ‘Adopt a cop’ initiative wasn’t working because the policemen only attended meetings.
Mthembu said Sadtu aimed to work with communities to establish self-defence units to monitor safety at schools and report suspicious individuals to police. ‘The issue of safety should be as much of a priority as delivering textbooks to schools on time,” he said.
Former teacher and Mbombela mayoral committee member in Nelspruit, Jimmy Mohlala, agrees. He says teachers appear wealthy to unemployed people in poverty-stricken communities.
Mpumalanga’s education MEC Craig Padayachee, however, denied that there were as many as 40 attacks on teachers, saying, ‘There have been isolated incidents but the bottom line here is that we need to deal with crime in communities [as a whole]”.
Padayachee said that criminals would still take chances even if security guards were employed at schools and the carrying of guns by teachers wouldn’t solve the problem either.
But Mpumalanga is by no means unique. In November last year 26 schools in the Zwelitsha circuit, KwaZulu-Natal, were closed because of crime in the area. No learners wrote their final examinations, except matric students who wrote under the protection of security guards. – African Eye News Service with additional reporting by Suzan Chala