Mr. Sebeso W. Phajane
Principal · Addressee“If a learner cannot read by Grade 4, that is a debt the whole school owes — not the child's fault. We pay it back patiently, every term, until it is settled.”
Mr. Phajane joined Madidi as a Grade 5 Mathematics teacher in 2004 and stepped into the principal's office in 2017, after eight years as Deputy. He still teaches one Grade 7 Maths period on Friday afternoons — “to remember what tired children look like at the end of a week,” he says.
You will find him at every Tuesday-night SGB meeting, the Heritage Day choir rehearsal, and the front gate at 06:50 most mornings. He is also the school's designated Addressee under SASA, which means any formal complaint or compliment lands on his desk first. He answers his email himself, usually before assembly.
He grew up two streets from the school, in the same four-room house his mother still lives in, and walked these dusty roads to Madidi as a Grade 1 learner in 1979. His own Grade 3 teacher, Mma Selepe, attended his graduation in 2002 — and his swearing-in as principal fifteen years later. He keeps her retirement card pinned above the desk, just to the right of the framed Section 21 letter.
Outside school hours, he chairs the Madidi Ward Reading Forum, a small Saturday-morning group that runs free Setswana literacy clinics for caregivers at the community hall. He completed his B.Ed Hons (Educational Leadership) at NWU in 2015 and is currently halfway through a part-time M.Ed on multilingual classroom assessment — a project, he insists, that the Grade 2 teachers are doing most of the real work for.
