Nkhoma CDSS evicts teacher from house
Nkhoma Community Day Secondary School (CDSS) committee in Lilongwe on Tuesday evicted its former teacher from a house they claim he had been clinging to since he was transferred to Lilongwe Girls Secondary School a year ago.
Nkhoma CDSS head teacher Boyd Manda confirmed the development in a telephone on Thursday.
He said members of the school committee had to break a door to remove the teacher’s property from the house.
According to Manda, the teacher in question, Timothy Kufeyani, was transferred by the Central West Education Division (Cwed) alongside the posting of his wife, who is also a secondary school teacher, to Biwi Day Secondary School.
However, Manda said until their eviction this week, the Kufeyanis were still operating from Nkhoma since the wife’s posting came in August.
In an interview on Wednesday, Kufeyani, 52, complained of unfair treatment by the school committee.
“How could they do that to us? I kept telling them that we were still looking for a house in town. That was why we were still operating from there,” said Kufeyani.
He told Nation on Sunday that he had been raising the issue of accommodation with Cwed, the police and Lilongwe Girls Secondary School, all of whom rebuffed him on the basis that it was a personal matter.
Documents whose copies Nation on Sunday has seen indicate that Kufeyani even sought legal intervention when Nkhoma CDSS committee threatened him with eviction.
He was granted an order of stay of execution by the Industrial Relations Court a fortnight ago that gave the couple a chance to extend their stay in the house up to January 7 2016.
“I am surprised that the committee decided to disobey the court. Where do we begin from now?” Kufeyani wondered when he visited Nation Publications Limited (NPL) offices in Lilongwe.
Kufeyani’s wife feels the family is being victimised by Cwed for transferring her husband to a school which is far away from her duty station.
In a letter titled ‘Implication on posting instruction to Biwi CDSS’, she wrote: “I feel the posting is coming as a punishment because I am a woman. Suppose you had posted me to Lilongwe Girls, would you have posted my husband to Biwi?
“And my husband, whom you think I should follow, has no accommodation at Lilongwe Girls and is retiring from teaching soon. But because I’m a woman, I am forced to follow him,” reads her letter in part.
Efforts to get a comment from Cwed proved futile as the ground line went unanswered.
According to Manda, Nkhoma CDSS has accommodation for only 15 teachers, the rest rent elsewhere or stay with spouses working at the nearby CCAP Mission. n
