Education for all was the policy Zimbabwean authorities pursued diligently for much of the first decade after independence. The goal was to extend education to the previously disadvantaged black majority. Scores of schools were built and the training of thousands of teachers speeded up.
It did not take long to bear fruit. By 2000 Zimbabwe had achieved an adult literacy rate, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, of 93%, the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Sadly, those classroom gains are in jeopardy, threatened by triple-digit inflation and political unrest. One urban primary school says at least half of its more than 1 000 pupils cannot afford fees. The very poor, including Aids orphans, can apply for government help. But it is always too little, too late.
The school is permanently entangled in a cash crisis. Four classes have to share an average of 20 textbooks. There is no money to replace even the Z$100 worth of exercise books stolen during a burglary.
Parents cannot come to the school’s rescue either. Four years of economic contraction and increasing inflation have left many unemployed and impoverished.
The situation is often even worse in rural areas. Here, not only are parents too poor to finance the recurrent costs of education, but teachers are being targeted by President Robert Mugabe’s marauding youth militia and war veterans, who consider them informants and community leaders.
Brian Raftopolous, associate professor at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies, says in ”its attempt to deal with this growing economic disaster and the severe loss of political legitimacy”, the ruling Zanu-PF has attacked its own state structures, including those in the educational sphere.
This is one of the many reasons the country’s education system, long trumpeted as Mugabe’s enduring achievement, is on its knees.
Mugabe’s educational achievements had extended to tertiary education, where tens of thousands of graduates were poised to run what was once one of Africa’s most viable economies.
Ironically, however, that same education has also equipped its beneficiaries with the skills many are selling in neighbouring countries, and overseas.
Compared with one university at independence, Zimbabwe now has six state universities, with another being planned. The quantity of institutions has increased, but hardly the same can be said for quality.
After independence, education ministries were often allocated the biggest share of the national budget. But economic consultant John Robertson says there has been a shift, as ”it would seem they weren’t given the money allocated to them”.
He says it appears when the government overspends in one area, it makes up for the shortfall by taking from the education and health allocations, hoping donor funding will plug the hole. ”But that hasn’t happened.”
Education has clearly been a major casualty of the Zimbabwe crisis, but the number of students from Botswana has increased, says Hugh Henstridge, campus director of Speciss College, a favourite among the Tswanas.
”There’s a big gap in tertiary education in Botswana,” he says. The weak Zimbabwe dollar has also made it cheaper for middle-class parents to send their children to Zimbabwe and not South Africa. — IPS