Tsorotso San Development Trust has failed to host its annual International Mother Language Day commemorations after the Tsholotsho Rural District Council called off the event.
The commemorations, which were set to take place Friday, were belated celebrations of the day which is celebrated on February 21.
This year the theme is“multilingual education-a necessity to transform education.”
Tsorotso San Development Trust director, Davy Ndlovu, told CITE in an interview that they were very disappointed when they received communication from the RDC that they cannot hold the celebrations.
“We were supposed to host our annual commemoration Friday, as we always do, but for some reason we got communication from the RDC, Wednesday, that our event has been cancelled,” Ndlovu narrated.
“They said the reasons stated are that we are not a registered organisation and that we do not have a Memorandum of Understanding with them. This came as a surprise to us because we registered our organization in 2014 and we do have an MOU with the local authority.”
Ndlovu said everything was going on course since they started their preparations three weeks ago and they did not see this cancellation coming.
“We started our preparations three weeks ago. We wrote a letter to inform the RDC about the event. We gave them their invitation and we even gave them several other invitations asking them to extend them to other interested stakeholders on our behalf,” he said.
“The RDC returned the other letters but they told us whom to send them to. We approached the stakeholders and they were all interested. We got positive responses from a lot of them.”
He added: “We had recently done some work with the Ministry of Education under the Curriculum Development Unit when they were writing books for ECD so we invited them. More people got to know about the event and itseems the local authority was not happy with this. They said we had invited some stakeholders without their knowledge and on that basis our event was cancelled.”
Ndlovu said the development is saddening and the organization deals with a minority language hence such action from authorities is worrying.
Tsholotsho RDC Chief Executive Officer Nkululeko Sibanda confirmed that the event has been cancelled, noting that the organisers of the event failed to follow certain protocol.
“Indeed the event has been canceled but the reasons are that the organisers of the event failed to follow protocol which resulted in some logistical glitches here and there,” Sibanda said.
“Some of the stakeholders who were supposed to host the invited guests could not be available hence the event had to be postponed to a later date that is yet to be determined.”
