TSC now denies dishing out teaching positions to MPs

THE Teachers Service Commission has denied allegations that it has been dishing out employment letters to politicians.

TSC chief executive Nancy Macharia dismissed the claims as media speculation, saying her office has lived by the principles of recruitment.

Appearing before MPs, she said she had “only been seeing the reports in the media”, adding that there is no truth to them.

“I read this in newspapers. It is giving TSC a bad name since we are the ones mandated to recruit teachers,” Macharia said.

She was responding to concerns by lawmakers at the committee on Constitutional Implementation led by Runyenjes MP Eric Muchangi, alias Karemba, that prominent people were picking employment letters from TSC.

“We have seen Cabinet secretaries with TSC employment letters at funerals and churches. This doesn’t augur well with the nation,” the MP said.

“We are setting a bad precedent and we have to bring the controversial practice to an end. It is incumbent upon all of us to deal with this problem as a country,” Runyenjes MP Eric Karemba said.

At the meeting held in Parliament on Tuesday, TSC flagged a severe shortage of 98,261 teachers in public schools.

This is besides the excruciating deficit of teachers for specialised subjects that were introduced under the new competency-based curriculum setting.

It is emerging that there are no trained teachers in the country for leather crafts, picture making, sculpture, jewellery, media technology and woodwork.

There are also no qualified instructors for general science, indigenous languages, as well as marine and fisheries technology.

Macharia said the shortage crisis has been worsened by the rollout of junior secondary schools.

She added that the crisis is expected to deepen with the planned introduction of senior schools by next year.

The TSC boss warned that without urgent action, the growing deficit would continue to undermine Kenya’s education system.

The committee was probing the extent to which TSC has lived up to its constitutional mandate.

Macharia said the teacher shortage problem has been compounded by “rampant sporadic school expansions”.

The new institutions, she added, are being established without corresponding budgets for teacher recruitment.

“TSC has not achieved the optimal number of teachers since its establishment, hence the need for more budgetary allocations,” she said.

She attributed the crisis to chronic underfunding, which has hindered efforts to meet staffing needs and deliver quality education.

This was even as MPs raised concerns about the imbalance in the distribution of teachers, with some schools overstaffed as others suffer.

“Do we have parameters for setting the number of teachers against the number of students?”

Tongaren MP John Chikati said.

He raised concerns that TSC has been recruiting tutors who graduated recently to the detriment of those who have been unemployed for years.

“Why not have programmes where teachers are hired on the basis of their graduation dates?” the MP, who is also Ford Kenya’s secretary general, said.