Mozambique to produce textbooks from grade 1 to grade 3

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Mozambique to produce textbooks from grade 1 to grade 3

2:44 CAT | 13 Oct 2022

Screen grab: TVM

The Mozambican government will provide funds to the Education Ministry, starting next year, to procure textbooks locally for the first cycle of primary education, i.e. from grade 1 to grade 3.

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi announced the move this Wednesday in Maputo during the celebrations that marked the Teachers’ Day.

In the coming years, the government will also start financing, with its own resources, procure textbooks for free distribution. ‘We will start gradually. We don’t have much, but we have to start to avoid dependency and swallow some mistakes which are imposed on us and not to be called names. If we want to be free and independent, we have to embark on this journey, he explained.

Nyusi added this will be the first time that the government takes the responsibility to finance the production of textbooks for free distribution.

′′Our aim is that, as the conditions are created, textbooks will be produced locally with our own resources. We have knowledge. Printing and binding is not an alien science and we can do it,’’ he stressed.

He said that, as a government, the commitment to the education of Mozambicans remains unwavering, and that the agenda is one of a permanent search for answers to increase access to quality education.

This is how, according to Nyusi, the sector is expected to grow by 3.5 percent next year.

He took the opportunity to pay tribute to the teachers for their role in the development of societies.

The teacher is always first, since It is hard to imagine a developed nation without good teachers. Besides teaching science and technology they shape the development of citizens’ personality, said the President.

This year, the teachers’ day is celebrated under the theme ‘Promoting Permanent Dialogue Towards a Union Identity’.

Nyusi reaffirmed the government’s openness to dialogue, not only during this year, but also throughout his governance.

The production of textbooks in Mozambique may have been precipitated by unacceptable detected in the new textbook published by the Portuguese company Porto Editora.

They contain errors in basic maths, ridiculous mistakes in geography, and ungrammatical Portuguese.

Perhaps most serious of all, one of the books praises colonialism for supposedly ending ethnic wars in Africa.

The worst errors concern basic geography. In a section dealing with pre-colonial states in southern Africa, the book states that Great Zimbabwe was bordered to the north by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. That would put Great Zimbabwe in the Arabian Peninsula, thousands of kilometres from its true location.

It also claimed that Malawi and Zambia are to the south of Zimbabwe, whereas in fact they are to the north.

At one point, the book puts Mozambique in East Africa, along with Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The authors seemed blissfully unaware that, ever since independence in 1975, Mozambique has been classified as a southern African country, and was a founding member of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

Mozambique imports annually over 15 million textbooks.