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Country in crisis: Irate pupils march, block roads in Blantyre

The social upheaval that comes with economic hardships reared its ugly head yesterday as primary school pupils—some as young as six years old—enveloped Blantyre in a swarm of anger at what they see as Capital Hill’s neglect of their education.

The pupils were angry at government for the continued delays in paying their teachers’ October salaries, almost three weeks after their official payday, which is 27th of each month.

No through road to vehicles: The pupils at the junction of Mahatma Ghandi and Kapeni roads in Mount Pleasant
No through road to vehicles: The pupils at the junction of Mahatma
Ghandi and Kapeni roads in Mount Pleasant

The development has seen the basic educators abandoning their work in protest for the past two weeks.

Already, about 6 000 teachers under the seventh Initial Primary Teachers Education (IPTE7) and Open and Distance Learning (ODL2), who were employed in May and reported to their workplaces in June, have gone five months without receiving their salaries.

Yesterday, classes in most schools were abandoned as pupils took to the streets where they damaged several vehicles, blocked roads with rocks, some more than their sizes, and vandalized some billboards.

The damaged vehicles, which included an Axa bus registration Axa 17, were parked at Manase Police Unit and Blantyre Police Station.

According to information gathered by The Nation, it all started with pupils from Catholic Institute (CI) who mobilised themselves and started visiting other schools such as Namasimba, Zingwangwa, Namiwawa, Mbayani, among others, where they forced their colleagues to join them.

Last week, pupils from Namatete Primary School in Chirimba Township went on a sole protest after they stayed for one week without entering in class.

As the pupils’ protests spread yesterday, one of our reporters had to heavily invest in his feet to save his skin at Mt Pleasant as a little platoon of boys and girls aged between eight and 14 went after him with stones and sticks after seeing him stealing photographs of their demonstrations.

Along Independence Drive that leads to the presidential palace of Sanjika, some pupils lay on their backs across the width of the road, with their little tummies innocently bared to a chilly midday afternoon—in a daring ‘kill-us-if-you-can’ affair.

All this time there were no presence of police officers who only started blocking the young learners after extensive damage had already been done.

The pupils were joined by teachers from Ndirande area (Ndirande Hill, Kachere and Blantyre Girls) who also marched to the district education manager’s (DEM) office to express their discontent.

The teachers danced and sang songs of disapproval as they demanded to meet the DEM or her deputy both of whom were not present.

But Ministry of Education, Science and Technology acting spokesperson Manfred Ndovi in an interview on Tuesday blamed the salary delays on the decentralisation system, which the ministry has just introduced.

“We had problems with our payment system as you know the ministry has just embarked on the decentralisation process of paying teachers. We started with divisions because we could not roll out at district level, but our friends in Blantyre Urban had problems with their system as it was on and off,” said Ndovi.

He said because of the problems, they decided to send the payment vouchers to the ministry’s headquarters for assistance “only to face other problems”.

“The network really betrayed us, but as I am talking, the problems have been sorted out and some teachers have started getting paid. If there are any more problems, those should be with individual banks,” he assured.

The new payment system affected six districts, including Chitipa, Nsanje, Mulanje, Chiradzulu, Blantyre Urban and Ntchisi. Ndovi said they were expecting every affected teacher to get paid by end of the week.

But the damage had already been done going by yesterday’s chaos in the commercial city instigated by little boys and girls.

All this was happening when President Peter Mutharika was at the Great Hall in Zomba for his coronation as the fifth chancellor of the University of Malawi (Unima) and awarding of degrees and postgraduate diplomas to 397 graduates.

The pupils’ protests—taken together with the ongoing Judiciary support staff’s strike and threats of demonstration by a section of civil society organisations (CSOs) over the worsening economy—maybe a signal that the President’s extended governing honeymoon is over and people now want him to start delivering on his promises.

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