/ 7 February 2009

Zimbabwe children suffer as schools stay closed

The decline of Zimbabwe's education system, which was once the pride of the region, has matched the general unravelling of the country's economy.

On a recent school morning, pupil Florence Marembo was all dressed up with nowhere to study: the 12-year-old instead played with a dozen other students on the grounds of her school in a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

Her teachers at Gwinyiro Primary School said they wouldn’t work until the government pays them in foreign currency because they can’t even afford the bus fare amid the country’s economic meltdown.

But Florence, who wore a faded but neatly pressed navy blue uniform, said she’d be coming to the school each day anyway because staying at home was boring.

”My parents have already paid my school fees for this term and I think I am not going to learn anything,” she said despondently. ”We spent the whole of last year without learning and maybe it will be the same story this year again.”

The swift decline of an education system that was once the pride of the region has matched the general unravelling of Zimbabwe’s economy and infrastructure as Zanu-PF leader Robert Mugabe clings to the power he has held for 28 years.

Aid groups warn the closures also mean that hundreds of thousands of children will go hungry unless the schools open, because it’s the only place many children can get a proper meal.

Mugabe’s government says schools have not opened because teachers are still grading the results of examinations written last year.

Teachers, though, say they will not mark those papers because it is immoral to grade children in a year when most averaged 23 days of learning in rural schools and 48 days in urban centres instead of the usual 180 days.

”It was a blank academic year. Most children did not learn anything but the government will not admit to the total collapse of our education system,” says Oswald Madziva, spokesperson for the independent Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe’s politicians, he says, ”have sacrificed education and other social services on the political altar”.

When Mugabe became the first freely elected leader of Zimbabwe in 1980, he made education a priority. Within four years the number of primary school pupils had ballooned from 800 000 to more than 2,5-million and high school students from 66 000 to more than 600 000.

But British charity Save the Children estimates only two out of 10 Zimbabwean children got to school at all last year. And it says many poor families are forced to send children out to find work or gather wild foods and simply cannot afford to send them to school.

Teachers can’t afford the bus fare to get to work either: the government paid them the equivalent of just $4 in December — enough to buy four loaves of bread.

Dizzying inflation
Zimbabwe’s government has been unable to control the dizzying inflation that had it paying teachers in hundreds of trillions of worthless Zimbabwe dollars. Last week, the government abandoned all exchange controls and said Zimbabweans can now trade in foreign currency.

Teachers, like many others, are asking how they can buy goods sold in United States dollars if they are not paid in the currency.

Directors of private schools contacted by the Associated Press, including some rural mission schools run by the Roman Catholic Church, said they are paying teachers with food packages and fuel coupons as well as between $5 and $50.

The directors, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation, said some boarding schools have not managed to open because they cannot guarantee food supplies for students. Parents of some students paid foreign currency and fuel coupons that allowed one school to send a teacher across the border into Botswana to buy food for boarders, one headmaster said.

The United States-based Christian charity, World Vision International, warns hundreds of thousands of children will go hungry if schools stay shut.

Spokesperson Stewart Muchapera said they had planned to feed more than half-a-million children at schools with a nutritious porridge of bulgur wheat and sugar beans.

”For some children, it’s the only proper meal they get and we already have reports of children wasting away,” Muchapera said.

The United Nations Children’s Fund says 30% of children in rural areas are suffering malnutrition and 1,7-million are orphans — the highest per capita figure in the world largely because of untreated Aids cases.

Nearly one in 10 children die before their fifth birthday, spokesperson Tsitsi Singizi said.

The UN World Food Programme has increased its estimate of the number of Zimbabweans in need of emergency food aid from five million to seven million.

Tens of thousands of teachers have left the country while thousands of others have left the profession to try to scrounge a living as street vendors, according to Madziva. His union estimates that about 70 000 teachers remain from about 150 000.

Madziva’s union estimates that each of the 7 000 to 8 000 schools has lost at least three teachers in Aids-related deaths in the past few years and that Aids-related illness keeps one or two teachers away from school each term.

The government has responded by posting advertisements calling for anyone with an ”Ordinary Level” school certificate — examinations written when students are about 16 — to come forward and teach.

The ranks of teachers have also been thinned by the political violence that surrounded elections last year. The union says at least two teachers were beaten to death.

Human rights activists also say some rural schools were used as torture centres by government troops, police and ruling party militants in the aftermath of the election and that some of those centres still operate today.

The decline of Zimbabwe’s education system is already reflected in public examination results.

Government figures for ”Ordinary Level” examinations show a drop from a pass rate of 72% for 2005 to 11% in 2006. — Sapa-AP