Minister admits most TIE textbooks have mistakes

Dodoma. The minister of Education, Science and Technology, Prof Joyce Ndalichako, yesterday admitted before Parliament that most of the textbooks recently released by the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE) were full of mistakes.

Prof Ndalichako informed the House that her office has already launched a process of taking disciplinary measures against all TIE officials who permitted the half-baked books into the market.

“I want to assure the House that punitive measures will be taken against all culprits in order to end this business-as-usual attitude. Last year I had a very difficult time in passing my budget here, I won’t let the officials compromise my credibility again,” she said.

The minister said the government is currently undertaking an extensive analysis on the magnitude of the problem before deciding on what to do next.

Prof Ndalichako explained as she was presenting budget estimates for her ministry for the 2017/18 fiscal year.

According to her, TIE distributed 6,862,800 Standard Two textbooks and 6,818,181 Standard Three textbooks. For secondary schools, a total of 1,958,628 books for O-Level and 151,055 copies for A-Level were distributed.

Tabling her alternative budget speech, Shadow minister for Education, Ms Susan Lyimo, said their assessment indicated that the books contained all sorts of mistakes, from grammatical, punctuation, pagination to style.

She referred to a Standard Three title: “I learn English Language”, saying the mistakes started from the title itself.

“On page 16, there is a sentence reading: ‘These are my parent’ instead of ‘parents’. On page 138, a sentence reads ‘The driver is taken the police station’ instead of …is taken to the police station. On Page 143 they say Dodoma is the big city of Tanzania, instead of capital city,” she quoted noting that the there were about 15 mistakes in just one book.

Debating the budget speech, most MPs faulted the government over poor quality of textbooks and recommended for the establishment of a regulatory body that would oversee the education sector.

Mr James Mbatia (Vunjo-NCCR) said the government has not shown commitment to improve the sector as most of passed parliamentary resolutions on the sector were yet to be implemented.