Africa-Press – Eswatini. Bongumusa Simelane – Parents from Ntsinini High School have called for the removal of the Head teacher Jeremiah Kunene, who is also the controversial Pastor of El Tabernacle Holy Ghost Ministries.
The church has been hogging the headlines for all the wrong reasons following the mysterious disappearance of its congregants last week, who were discovered on Sunday after a frantic search.
Kunene, who went missing with the pupils, returned to the school yesterday to resume his duties. However, tempers flared when parents came face-to-face with the head teacher at the school.
Visibly upset parents demanded to know how come the head teacher was back at the school while some of their children who are also pupils in the same school were still not back.
They abruptly stopped their meeting which they were attending at the school to demand answers from the head teacher, but some community leaders defused the situation until officers from the ministry of education came to address them.
The head teacher was seen moving around the school premises and that’s when the parents are said to have been angered, demanding to know what he was doing there. Some of the parents said it would have been better if he had stayed in his house in the teachers’ quarters other than coming to school while he knew that parents were still angry at him for taking their children without their permission.
Officials from the Hhohho Regional Education Office had to be deployed in the school to assess the situation after they learnt that Kunene had returned. However, the meeting had to end unceremoniously as parents did not understand when officials said it was impossible to remove the head teacher overnight.
Parents had to leave without any closing remarks as they showed their dissatisfaction with the response from the officials from the office of the REO. This was after one official told them that the issue had to be dealt with by the ministry of education and training and it was not going to be an overnight thing as there are a lot of things that still need to be considered before removing Kunene.
The meeting with the parents and the officials took place while some of the congregants were still in the mountain praying. It is only the 13 children from Mhlangatane who have returned after they were fetched by their parents.
Hhohho REO Thuli Langwenya said inspectors were sent to the school, but at the time she had not got a report of how the situation was. She stated that her office, however, did not receive prior information that the parents did not want the head teacher from the school.
One of the community leaders, Mthunzi Luhlanga, who is also a former chairperson of the school committee, said they got reports that some of the children were now scared to go back to school, as they feared that they might be a laughing stock. Luhlanga said by the look of things, the children would need counselling to prepare them so that they go back to class after the whole ordeal.
He said among the things that the parents wanted was the removal of the head teacher with immediate effect, after what he all that he did. Luhlanga said parents also asked the officials that counselling for the children should be arranged as some were scared of going back to school.
While the meeting was going on, the head teacher had locked himself in his office. This was after he was seen in the school, while he had allegedly told his deputy that he was going to fix his car in a certain garage.
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