The CEO Roundtable of Tanzania (CEOrt) has taken issue with the newly-launched education policy which, among others, replaced English with Kiswahili as a medium of instruction in primary and secondary schools.
In a statement availed to this paper on Tuesday, the Chairman of CEOrt, Mr. Ali Mufuruki, said the change in policy sounds great and even patriotic but it will spell disaster for the development of local human resources on whose strength the future of Tanzania highly depends.
Mr. Mufuruki was of the view that in today’s globalised world, Tanzanians do not have the luxury of being able to create their own reality that can be kept safe from the effects of competitive forces that are a dominant feature of today’s life.
“As someone who was educated in a developed foreign country that uses its own indigenous language as a medium of instruction from kindergarten to university, you would expect I would be supportive of this big change.
“So why am I upset by the new change? It is because I don’t believe the changes were made in good faith nor was enough preparation to ensure systems are in place and ready so that we don’t put our generations at a disadvantage from which they will not be able to recover easily,” Mr. Mufuruki stressed.
Mr. Mufuruki concurs on the other hand that being able to acquire and to impart knowledge in local languages is a mark of progress and cultural maturity, not backwardness or weakness.
“After all, most developed nations from North America through Europe, Asia, and Latin America to Arabia use their own languages as medium of instruction for all stages of schooling,” Mr. Mufuruki, who is also the Chairman and founder of Infotech Investment Group, said in the statement.
He added; “There is also the issue of fairness and honesty or lack of it. I am very curious to see if those responsible for this policy change are going to move their children from the private English medium schools to the Kiswahili-only public schools where the majority of the country’s children go”.
The CEOrt boss suspects that the change in policy may be nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction of policymakers to the steadily falling pass rates at both primary and secondary school levels over the past twenty years and is, therefore, a wrong solution to the problem.
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By DAILY NEWS Reporter