Abuse of office affecting education

IN the recent past, Southern Highland has been renowned for appointing incompetent and unqualified people to head key positions using politics as a selection criteria.
Governors alike have been playing politics with the children’s future by engaging anyone on the street to occupy a senior position with no expertise and qualification matching such positions.
The consequences of appointing incompetent people to manage the province’s education system is the alarming statistics of poor grade 10 and grade 12 national examination results.
A few years back Southern Highlands got media publicity for all the wrong reasons when secondary schools in the province were penalised for cheating in the grade 10 and grade 12 national examinations.
The quality of education in the province remains dormant as appointment of teachers and education officers in the province has been politicised.
Many career teachers and education officers were disposed making way for unqualified and inexperienced teachers to take up senior or higher level teaching positions over the years.
A high number of teachers from the province are flying in/out of Port Moresby during term holidays to settle the never ending salary issues or follow up on the delayed Tuition Fee Free (TFF) grants.
Some have been chased out of Fincorp Haus for reasons only known to the Waigani based education officers. The mass movement of teachers into Port Moresby to pursue issues that can be managed at the provincial level only resembles the lack of quality leadership and managerial powers and directives at the provincial level.
Provincial and district education officers are abusing their position and office by accepting bribes from teachers in exchange of teaching positions.
The worst is experienced in the Kagua-Erave district.
A few remote schools have been reactivated and ghost names assigned to these ghost schools, enrollment figures and school accounts to prey on the unaccounted TFF funds.
Only recently, an illegally appointed head master for Marorogo Primary School in the Kagua-Erave was implicated for exploiting the school’s TFF subsidies by forging signatures of the school’s chairman and the treasurer, totaling more than K20,000.
The fake SHPEB had failed to pursue the case despite receiving copies of the illegal bank transactions.
The matter was reported to Mendi Police in August 2019.
The people of Southern Highlands would like to see a change in the quality of education at all levels of the education system in the province in 2020 and beyond.
Do not play politics with children’s education and future.

Yaporolo Weki,
Education Adviser – Peoples Republic of Rou’areke