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By Tahari Jamal
Fes- Monday May 12th was not a normal day for thousands of teachers holding advanced university degrees. They are asking for equal promotion, and temporarily stopped striking in hopes that the Ministry of Education and the trade unions would find a fair solution for the two cohorts (2012 and2013) deprived of promotions based on the degrees they obtained. The result of the long and insincere negotiations between the government and the five trade unions is that eight teachers were sentenced to two months imprisonment, suspended execution by the First Instance Court in Rabat on charges of assaulting a police officer.
Instead of responding to the demands of the strikers for the past three months, the Ministry of Education is still complicating the issue. The ministry’s strong desire to deter all forms of protest is meticulously carried out through oppressive methods, and it seems that it has no intentions to solve the issues the protesters present.
These teachers obtained their degrees from public universities and made a lot of effort to pursue higher education and research, but now that they’ve graduated, the government is now reneging on its commitments. They are treated like a nuisance to the state and not as precious human resources who are going to develop their country and serve their community effectively. If the government really doubts the qualifications and the competence of these teachers, then it is high time to forbid education in Morocco. It is amazing how these teachers are considered incompetent, and that the ministry needs to test their intellectual abilities, whereas the previous cohorts were competent and got promoted on the basis of the degrees they have.
Therefore, to prevent these teachers from asking again for the right to promotion -just like their colleagues- which is guaranteed by the 2011 constitution, the Ministry of Education cleverly resorted to unfair and punitive procedures such as massive wage deuctions.
In the last February session, thousands of teachers took the promotion exam in spurious and compromised circumstances; there was chaos and disorder in the exam setting. Some found the opportunity to enter the exam room secretly, while others pretended to be teacher trainers, and so on. The issue is that a lot of teachers were not able to take the exam due to the aforementioned conditions, and because they were forced to come back to their workplaces, they were deprived of the exam; though the government promised to launch a second session for those who were not able to sit for the exam in April, so far nothing has been announced.
Who is to blame? Is it the trade unions or the Ministry of Education? If the government really wanted to solve the problem and put an end to the inefficiencies in the educational sector, it would start tomorrow, but it seems that teachers in Morocco are doomed to be left behind.
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