Dokora on Ndebele books
GOVERNMENT will not withdraw from schools, a Grade One Ndebele textbook which has caused social media upheaval over alleged wrongly spelt words, a Cabinet Minister has said.
Primary and Secondary Education Minister Lazarus Dokora said there was nothing wrong with the textbook.
Minister Dokora said this in Senate on Thursday while responding to a question posed to him by Bulawayo Senator Agnes Sibanda (MDC-T).
“There is a new book that was released for Grade 1 with wrongly spelt Ndebele words. I would like to know whether you have withdrawn the book from the syllabus or it is still there? Most of the things that are written in that book, the words are not correctly spelt.
“Why should you take a Shona speaking person to come and write a Ndebele book? Is it that there are no Ndebele speaking people who can write the book that you want as a Ministry? It was written by someone who is not a native Ndebele speaker, hence they used wrong spellings,” said Sen Sibanda while posing her question.
In his response, Minister Dokora said the allegations made by Senator Sibanda were mere rumours spread through social media.
“I can say this is a rumour being spread by the social media and we made investigations to know the truth. These books belong to a certain organisation and it was responsible for the writing of those books. We have organisations which write these books and after they are taken to our ministries. We have experts in our ministry who will inspect these books to assess if they can be used or not. When schools buy text books, they buy only those which are certified by this certifying department to be useable. This book is written SEKUTHE the first spelling and the second spelling is DLWE on the cover; our experts informed us that there is nothing wrong with this,” said Minister Dokora.
“If you go to the social media, where this originated and is circulating, you will find that this word DLWE, they have added an H. Social media is distorting information, promoting tribalism and creating animosity among the people of Zimbabwe and the information they are giving is quite different from the book I am holding here. That is the truth of the matter.”