BY TAPIWA ZIVIRA AND MELODY CHAITWA
HARARE – Justin Mutume*, a teacher at a rural secondary school in Shamva, rises daily at 5 a.m and walks to a pig farm nearby where he brush-clean pigs due for slaughter. In return, he gets a bag of maize a week.
“I am doing this dirty work because my salary can no longer afford to buy food for my family, I have since lost my dignity as a teacher in a community,” said Mutume, a father of three. With the schools reopening, he is negotiating shifts with his “second boss” to fit in with school times.
Another teacher, identified as Chihota, is brewing skokian, a one-day home made brew, at his school home in Bindura to augment his salary.
Before Zimbabwe’s economic downfall through the past decade, teachers were among highly paid professionals. Now they are virtual beggars with salaries almost always way below the Poverty Datum Line (PDL). This month the regime increased the war veterans’ monthly allowance to $8.7 billion compared with teachers’ salaries averaging $3 billion, below the PDL of over $5 billion.
For most of last term teachers were on strike. The state promised huge pay increases that never came.
Morale is low in schools, as many teachers have lost enthusiasm, preferring to do extra work like selling freezits, sweets, operating small phone shops or dealing in foreign currency.
Some teachers take off on cross border trading stints, and usually there are no replacements. At Rutope Secondary School near Harare there has been no mathematics teacher since last year.
More than 200 000 teachers, it is estimated, have left Zimbabwe. Many of the vacancies are filled by untrained school-leavers who are struggling.
Some teachers are in Britain, doing jobs such as caring for the old. Others work as farm labourers, housemaids or gardeners in Botswana and South Africa. The lucky ones have found teaching jobs in these countries.
Rita Kambasha, a teacher newly returned from South Africa, said her life there as a general hand on a citrus farm is far better than being a teacher in Zimbabwe.
“I can buy my family and parents back here groceries and clothes and I can sustain myself pretty well,” she said in an interview.
But Kambasha fears for her daughter’s education. “Our children are victims of a regime that does not have a heart for the education system and to expect them to become fully educated like we did in the past is a miracle.”
A snap survey in several schools revealed critical shortages of chalks, textbooks and ballpoint pens. In many Harare schools visited, paint is peeling, light bulbs are broken, ceilings have large holes, gutters are falling down, windows are broken, floors are potholed and roofs are falling in.
At Highfield High School they have coined the term ‘furniture war’ as pupils have to fight for desks.
“What happens is when pupils go for their practical lessons at the laboratories or workshops, they find their classrooms empty because another class would have taken their desks and chairs and they have to find their own from another empty classroom,” said a teacher at Highfield High, revered as the top-performing high density school.
“How can a school afford to replace broken windows when there is not enough chalk for the teachers?” said retired teacher Jonah Kaswamunzira.
Meanwhile, parents face rising fees, plus top-up fees mid-term. Boarding schools struggle to source groceries.
Currently many boarding schools are charging fees of $6 billion up to $30 billion for the term but with the hyper- inflation, parents will need to top up the fees
N.B * Not his real name because the Education Ministry bans teachers from speaking to the press.
Post published in: News