ESAT News (February 8, 2017)

Watch this: ESAT Amhara Region Teachers Meeting

Teachers in the Amhara region say Ethiopia is  a country where schools have been used as forums to promote the doctrine of a regime that works for the supremacy and dominance by one ethnic group.

The teachers in the Amhara region said schools are not free from the ethnic politics espoused by the ethnocentric regime.

A leaked minute from a conference by teachers in the Amhara region obtained by ESAT indicate that teachers in the region had enough of a Tigrian regime that only works to unfairly benefit Tigrians while at the same time deterring other ethnic groups.

The teachers have also expressed their grave concern that the quality of education is at its worst and the curriculum as well as the facts in textbooks have been deliberately altered to miseducate the generatio. The teachers further said at the conference that a considerable number of students attend classes hungry.

The conference by the teachers refute claims by the Tigrian ruling clique that it had the support of 85% of the teachers in the Amhara region. The teachers say only 5% of corrupted members of the school community have aligned themselves with the corrupt system.

The teachers at the five day conference also said it is deplorable that superintendents of schools were required to be ruling party members.

Raw materials have been taken out of the Amhara region to be used as inputs to factories built in Tigray, the teachers said adding that the regime’s only focus is accumulating wealth in Tigray at the expense of other people in the country.

The document obtained by ESAT also indicate that the teachers have demanded compensations to the lives lost in the hands of regime’s security forces as well as loss of property in the anti-government protests last year.

Several other grievances were also aired during the five day conference attended by close to 6,000 teachers in the Amhara region.