In Malawi, the suffering of teachers is not a secret—it is a national shame. Primary and secondary school teachers survive on salaries that are eaten alive by inflation, brutal PAYE deductions, and a collapsing economy. They work in overcrowded classrooms, without books, without laboratories, without basic facilities, yet are expected to produce miracles.
Msaka
And now, instead of relief, the Minister of Education, Hon. Bright Msaka, is offering them punishment.
First came the reckless talk of scrapping open secondary schools. Before that could even be properly debated, another decree followed: no teacher should teach in secondary school while holding any other engagement. These announcements are delivered with confidence, but without compassion, without logic, and without respect for the people who actually carry Malawi’s education system on their backs.
Let us be clear: teachers are not the problem. They are the last line of defence in a collapsing system.
If Hon. Msaka was serious about reform, he would ask a simple question: why are teachers forced to look for extra work? The answer is obvious. Their salaries cannot sustain a dignified life. Teachers are not moonlighting because they are greedy—they are doing so because they are hungry, indebted, and desperate.
To demand that teachers survive on one inadequate paycheck while ministers enjoy fuel allocations, sitting allowances, and comfort is not leadership. It is hypocrisy.
What makes this policy even more insulting is the double standard. Doctors in public hospitals are allowed—and even encouraged—to also work in private hospitals like Mwaiwathu. This is seen as a smart way to retain skilled professionals. But when teachers do the same to survive, they are treated like criminals.
So what is the message? That doctors deserve dignity, but teachers do not? Or that teachers are simply easier to bully because they lack powerful unions and elite connections?
This is what happens when policy is made in air-conditioned offices by people who have not stood in a classroom with 120 pupils, one piece of chalk, and no textbooks. It is leadership detached from reality—comfortable, arrogant, and dangerously out of touch.
Hon. Msaka’s posture sends a chilling message: that teachers are disposable, that their sacrifices mean nothing, and that government can squeeze them whenever it wants. This is an insult to a profession that has produced every doctor, lawyer, economist and leader Malawi has ever known—often under humiliating and degrading conditions.
Teachers are already stretched beyond human limits. They work long hours, manage impossible class sizes, and still deliver results. And instead of gratitude, they are rewarded with threats, restrictions, and economic suffocation.
The political question must be asked: Is this how the DPP treats civil servants? First PAYE hikes that slash take-home pay. Then silence on salaries. Now open hostility toward teachers trying to survive. This is a dangerous path that risks turning the public service into an angry, demoralized workforce.
Hon. Bright Msaka must slow down. Reform without consultation is recklessness. Policy without empathy is cruelty. You cannot improve education by beating the very people who make it possible.
Teachers are not the enemy. They are the solution. And any minister who forgets that will fail—no matter how loudly he speaks from behind a polished desk.
