AIDS and poverty stalk Zimbabwe schools

school fees; and those who can often fall asleep from hunger during class.
Independence in 1980 brought with it a boon for Africans. The new black-dominated government led by the then premier Robert Mugabe, later to become state president, announced a policy of education for all at primary level. It expanded the health service by building clinics in remote areas. Both services were free and won the government huge support following years of destruction during the 1970s liberation war.
One of Mugabe’s most wildly cheered political slogans-cum-promises was “Health for all by the Year 2000”.
In the euphoria of international goodwill immediately after the end of the war and the lifting of sanctions that had been imposed against the white minority-dominated Rhodesian Front government led by Ian Smith, donors poured in development money – for social services, schools and hospitals and so that boreholes could be sunk to provide clean water to rural communities. Government policy was that no pupil or patient should travel more than five kilometres to the nearest school or health centre.
Adult literacy education programmes proliferated in countryside and town. Soon Zimbabwe was achieving spectacular goals. It attained literacy rates of more than 80 per cent by 1990. There was nationwide immunisation of children against measles and malaria, which alone led to a cut in the childbirth mortality rate.
But the fairytale was too sweet to last. Since 1997 the country’s economy has been in freefall. The education system was in decline by the early 1990s. Schools had no books while hospitals lacked drugs and equipment. Doctors and nurses were emigrating in large numbers. Clean water in rural areas is now a luxury as most of the borehole pumps have broken down.
Kadzangarare school in Hurungwe outside Karoi, 225 km northwest of Harare, is emblematic of the nationwide institutional collapse that has followed Mugabe’s “land reform” launched in 1999-2000, during which white commercial farmers, and a handful of black ones, were driven from their properties with extreme violence.
Rati Moyo, 22, graduated with a teacher’s certificate from Hillside Teachers College in Bulawayo last year. She and a female colleague were deployed to Kadzangarare. The school buildings consist of two former tobacco-curing barns. There are no chairs or benches to sit on – and no windows. The teacher jots notes on a blackboard from the class’s only textbook. At the best-resourced schools five pupils share a textbook.
“The children can’t concentrate because they are always hungry, resulting in malnutrition and school dropouts,” said Rati. This is the part of the country with the most fertile agricultural soils and which until the late 1990s produced bumper crops of wheat and maize. Today, following the “land reforms”, the farms produce nothing.
Teachers use a communal pit latrine and firewood for cooking, and they have to travel 48 km to the town of Karoi to buy groceries. Rati’s gross pay of 33,000 Zimbabwe dollars (136 US dollars at the official exchange rate; 27 at the more realistic and most commonly used black market rate) is a slave wage in a country where inflation has topped 1200 per cent and the government itself defines the poverty line as an income below 110,000 Zimbabwe dollars a month.
Beset by poor conditions and low morale, AIDS is also ravaging the teaching profession, with an estimated annual death toll among teachers of 600. It is estimated that more than 25 per cent of members of the teaching profession are HIV-positive. The main teaching union, the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, said in a statement, “The majority of schools in Zimbabwe have lost at least one teacher to the disease, and at least two to three teachers [per school] are on AIDS-related sick leave.”
Speaking at a recent fundraising function at Daramombe school in Chivhu, 140 km south of Harare, Anti-Corruption Minister Paul Mangwana revealed that 278 of the school’s 600 pupils at the school had been orphaned by AIDS and that the government was paying their fees. He stood in front of ramshackle structures as he appealed for the local community and businessmen to make donations to build more classrooms. “Britain and the United States have imposed sanctions on us so people should not expect foreign donations,” he said.
In fact, there are no such sanctions on Zimbabwe: the only sanctions imposed by the international community are individual ones targeted at Mugabe and members of his administration, judiciary and armed services. – IWPR