LETTER: Value teachers in other ways

Build One SA leader Mmusi Maimane has sparked a thought-provoking conversation about the social standing of teachers. He has called for teachers to be valued, and their pay grade to be raised to that of medical practitioners.

That’s better than the vacuous ideas coming from careerists who hardly pull their weight to add value to the constituencies they purport to represent. However, it’s an anomaly to set graduates of teaching and medicine on the same valuation just because both are primary beneficiaries of basic education.

The benchmarking equivalence is incongruent. Let’s rather explore other avenues on the teaching front for the occupation to be valued. The same goes for nursing — a scarcity of nurses can be disastrous in a pandemic of a scale of Covid-19.

It’s therefore vital to put more emphasis on these professions. The starting point is to impose a 65-year age limit for public representatives and extend the retirement age for teachers to 70. The government should introduce a demand-based quota system in the teaching profession and make bursaries available for educators with service to further their studies.

This would benefit those who wish to stay in the profession or pursue career growth in the higher education and training sector. It wouldn’t do any harm to the fiscus, as it would give the Treasury a reason to put more stringent measures in place to curb unbridled procurement corruption and wasteful expenditure across all levels of the state.

If it gets this right sustainably, it would facilitate rolling the dispensation out to nursing and police personnel too. That would cushion these essential workers from the cost-of-living pressures.

Morgan Phaahla
Ekurhuleni

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