The Minister of Education, Innovation, Youth, Sports, Arts and Culture, Sanet Steenkamp, made a ministerial statement in the National Assembly on Thursday in relation to Job Amupanda's recent visit to Ndama East Primary School in the Kavango East Region.
The school is being operated from under trees with no water, adequate teaching materials or ablution facilities and caters to over 500 learners.
Steenkamp said Amupanda shared information with the media without any context, resulting in numerous queries to the ministry from the wider public, adding that this school is operating illegally.
She pointed out that it is wiser to first seek clarity from the ministry before disseminating information that could distort facts and lead to misinformation.
"The circulation of this information, as you will agree with me, has attracted significant attention from the wider public, resulting in varying discussions at different platforms by various interested parties who have since made very distorted conclusions due to the absence of an appropriate context to the matter."
Steenkamp said that after making an assessment of infrastructure challenges over the years, the ministry has come up with an accelerated infrastructure development plan, which enabled the ministry to construct about one thousand classrooms across all regions, catering to over 30,000 learners.
She said that in the Kavango East alone, they constructed 87 classrooms and 13 ablution blocks; 14 of these classrooms are at Ndama South, specifically targeting learners housed at illegal schools that were operating under trees.
"These illegal schools were mainly established – now this is the issue – and operated by some unemployed teacher graduates who insisted that, should a school be constructed, they must automatically take over on the payroll of the government. That's the first thing I want to state. Upon the completion of the above construction, all five illegal schools were directed in writing by the ministry on 20 September 2023 to close down their operations and to ensure that all learners at these schools are referred to the newly established schools and various other existing schools in the surrounding area for integration."
Steenkamp added that four of the five illegally operating schools complied with the directive and shut down operations, except for Ndama East Primary, which is located less than a kilometre away from the newly constructed and formally registered Ndama South government school, which started operating in September 2023.
She said that the ministry was fully vested with the issue long before Amupanda became aware, and continues to engage all stakeholders to ensure that the learners are given their teaching and learning space, provided that all conditions are met once they are able to acquire land.