Chairperson of the teachers, Wonderful Gama said they have taken this route because despite that parliament approved K8 billion for this fiscal year, the Ministry of Education is taking time to recruit IPTE 13 and 14 and others.

"We are very serious about this matter since it has been a long time since we graduated and we are giving you five days to respond to our challenges. Failing to do so, then we will conduct vigils at the presidential palace until our issues are answered," he said.

Ministry of Education spokesperson Mphatso Nkuonera said they are yet to receive the letter but has indicated that it's unfortunate that teachers are thinking this way because the allocated K8bn was not solely meant for their recruitment.

"We understand why it is important to have more teachers so that we can beat the pupil: teacher ratio at primary school. But because of resources, we cannot recruit everyone in the system. The allocated resources were not only meant for teachers’ recruitment," he explained.

Presidential spokesperson, Anthony Kasunda was not available for comment.

Statistics show that the average ratio in Malawi’s primary education is one teacher to 73 learners.

According to the Teachers Union of Malawi, there are currently about 10,000 primary school teachers who completed training but are unemployed.

Government introduced the accelerated teacher training programmes–the IPTE-1+1 and the IPTE Open Distance Learning to train more teachers with the aim of reducing the teacher-pupil ratio, but recruitment has been a challenge over the years due to inadequate resources.