National Federation Party Parliamentarian, Lenora Qereqeretabua is now questioning whether the Ministry of Education ascertained the percentage of students having access to learning on the Walesi platform while the Minister for Education Rosy Akbar has urged politicians to refrain from using children and their education to score cheap political points.
While responding to questions by Fijivillage in regards to the comments made against Qereqeretabua’s claims by Walesi and Akbar, Qereqeretabua says that the debate should not be about the free distribution of 100,000 decoders.
Qereqeretabua also did not specify how she was quoting the price of a Walesi box to be $149 but said that the debate should not be about the price of decoders; whether $99 or $149. She says it should be about the accessibility by students for school work.
She says decoders alone do not mean students have automatic accessibility to educational material being dished out through the platform.
Qereqeretabua adds decoders do not mean automatic connectivity to Walesi because one needs a television set, antenna and cables to ensure clear reception. She further says they are bringing these questions from the public to the Minister in their capacity as the Opposition whose job is to hold government accountable.
She adds to put this into context, the Minister for Education’s Ministerial Statement on Thursday 28th May was titled the Impact of COVID-19 and TC Harold on Education and she spoke about the Walesi platform.
Qereqeretabua says the day before, she asked Akbar in Parliament if she could inform why Government had failed to fulfill its 2015 budget policy announced in November 2014 of providing tablets or laptops as per its objective of ‘one tablet or laptop per child’ to all primary and secondary school students; something which was critical now to online learning seeing the disruption to school caused by COVID-19.
Akbar had told parliament that the Ministry of Education had to shelve the One Laptop Per Child Initiative because the Ministry had to reprioritise and restrategise because of TC Winston in 2016.
Akbar has urged politicians to refrain from using children and their education to score cheap political points after Opposition Member of Parliament, Lenora Qereqeretabua was quoted in the Fiji Times yesterday, claiming that the educational channel on Walesi was not accessible to all students - attributing to high costs.
Akbar says it is already common knowledge that as per the Fijian Government Subsidy Scheme, a Walesi set-top box comes completely free of cost to any Fijian earning below $30,000 a year per household.
The Education Minister says for families who can afford it, it costs from $89 to $99 and not $149, as said by the poorly researched NFP Member of Parliament in the poorly researched article by the Fiji Times.
Walesi has confirmed that 109,761 Fijian families have so far benefitted from the Government’s Walesi Subsidy Scheme and the free Walesi application (Android and iOS) has been downloaded over 400,000 times.
Akbar says these facts, in conjunction with the fact that 93% of the Fijian population is online, means that a large number of students should have access to the education content.
She also urges parents to get involved in their child’s education and encourage them to watch the channel.
Akbar also says every single school has been provided with the supplementary materials covering the same subject matter for parents to pick up, meaning should a student not have access to Walesi, they should have access to the same materials.
Akbar says the article also incorrectly states that they are holding classes over the Walesi television platform.
She says these are only supplementary classes which they are providing for the benefit of children and parents and none of these will be tested.
Akbar says every child will still go through all of these curricula with their teachers once school resumes.
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