And in other post Cabinet shuffle news - we today had a chance to speak to the ousted Minister of Education Oscar Requena.
After only 8 months, Requena was shuffled out of the powerful Ministry of Education back to the Ministry of Rural Transformation, Local Government, and Community Development.
And while he wouldn't call it a demotion, he rejected the way he believes the media has framed this move. He explained that while the shuffle is the decision of the prime minister, his time at MOE was well spent.
Oscar Requena, Minister of Rural Transformation
"The matter of Cabinet portfolios is a matter strictly for the prime minister. He decides where he sees best to appoint the Cabinet members in terms of their portfolios. I want to say that I had a very brief stint at the Ministry of Education. It was about 7 months. But in that 7 months there were several major accomplishments and I believe the media fails to look at this side of the story."
"I want to say that first and foremost, we were able to expand the healthy start school feeding program. We saw more schools included in a short time. We were able to develop a technical, vocational, education policy which Cabinet approved, I took that to Cabinet, we also saw the process commencing to develop the legislation and to put in place the necessary framework to revamp technical, vocational education in this country. You recently saw we were out in the schools distributing Chromebooks, we acquired 5,000 Chromebooks and we were able to distribute those in all the schools which we are going to see the construction of STEAM pavilions in all the districts, again another major accomplishment. We were able to forge and improve discussions with the BNTU and our teachers, we were able to see the whole issue of their increments and their salary increases settled among many other things."
