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Have action follow Nacte quality alert
2007-05-12 09:48:41
By Editor
On Thursday, National Council for Technical Education (Nacte) Executive Secretary Joffer Maggila was quoted as declaring that it was illegal for technical institutions falling under its authority to operate without being appropriately registered or accredited by the government agency.
The Nacte chief executive`s remarks serve as a reminder that there are educational and training institutions in Tanzania that have been offering and continue to offer courses of instruction by admitting students and charging fees when they know that they should not be doing so because they lack the requisite qualifications.
Put differently, what those institutions are or have been doing amounts to committing a crime and they therefore risk prosecution under the law.
What Maggila was doing in issuing the alert was merely restating a legal requirement because the conditions he was referring to are mandatory under the October 26, 2001 Registration Regulations (Government Notice No. 279) and the January 18, 2002 Accreditation Regulations (Government Notice No. 41).
In part, the regulations stipulate that the institutions in question must have information and learning resources sufficient in quality, depth, diversity and currency to support the relevant activities and programmes.
The institutions must also have professionally qualified tutorial and other staff able to provide appropriate support to users of information and learning resources, including training in effective application of information technology to students.
Even more importantly, the institutions are required to have sufficient numbers of qualified part and full-time tutorial and other staff equipped with enough appropriate education, training and experience to effectively support their educational programmes.
Although this will most likely look a very tall order, any country committed to offering quality education and training will find all these requirements well worth supporting.
That is one reason we think the reminder by the Nacte chief should jolt the nation into action aimed at ensuring that all those institutions not up to the mark step aside and reorganise for better performance in the future or be made to face the music if, despite their deficiencies, they remain recalcitrant.
The fact that education is expensive cannot be overemphasised. For quite a substantial proportion of our people, investing in education means paying through the nose because what one usually forgoes in the process can mean the difference between survival and starvation.
It is therefore clearly unacceptable for any institution or person to offer shoddy goods or services or illegally solicit customers for goods and services of dubious quality and charge a fortune for the criminal effort.
Yet, as noted above, that is exactly what some of the institutions the Nacte boss was referring to are or have been doing with relative impunity.
What we find most baffling, however, is that there is every possibility that things will remain much the same even after the discovery that mediocrity is the order of the day in some of our institutions of learning.
Action to arrest the appalling trend is long overdue, and Nacte should not refrain from showing the way by actually disciplining all cheats.
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