Hundreds of members of Operation Dudula marched to the Gauteng Department of Education in Johannesburg’s CBD to demand job opportunities for locally certified jobless educators.
Protesters also want the agency to prioritize the placement of South African students in schools. They accused the department of giving preference to foreign illegal immigrants over South Africans when it came to job opportunities. Thabo Ngayo, the National Coordinator of Operation Dudula, addressed the demonstrators.
“We make no apologies for it, comrades; they can call us names or be xenophobic.” This country’s law is the law of the country. We cannot tolerate lawlessness while we are present. There are others coming from other nations who want to transform our country into a banana republic. We cannot allow foreign people to come and work in our country if they do not have sufficient documentation.
Matome Chiloane, the Gauteng MEC for Education, said they would work with the leadership of Operation Dudula to establish common ground on the problems presented in Dudula’s memorandum of demands.
Protesters accuse the department of breaking immigration regulations by prioritizing the placement of international learners and hiring foreign instructors over South Africans. Chiloane has three weeks to comply with Dudula’s demands.
“I believe it is critical to meet with them. First, they stated that they had never met with the department, therefore we will meet with them. And we’d have had time to prepare a response to their memoranda by the time we met. So we’d be able to listen to them,” Chiloane explains.
Source: https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/operation-dudula-march-against-the-hiring-of-foreign-teachers/
