The announcement this week that Grade 7 students will not sit their exams is proof. The fact that the University of Zimbabwe has not reopened for the September semester and that in the majority of schools countrywide, students have not attended classes for the whole year, is indeed as unacceptable as it is a measure of the grandiose failure of this regime.
Perhaps the saddest thing is the fact that all exam classes at Grade 7, Ordinary Level and Advanced Level may actually not sit in the year 2008 and would have to repeat in 2009. At the core of the crisis is the state’s failure to pay teachers and lecturers adequate salaries or provide books and other materials.
The collapse of the education system is indicative of the general collapse and retreat of the state. That same decay is found in the health sector, where our people are suffering the indignity of feudal diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis. No wonder our life expectancy is now 34 for women and 37 for men; statistics rivalled only by Somalia and Sudan.
At least three million of our people have to receive food aid and currently 40% of the rural population are surviving on wild berries. In some areas, chiefs and headmen are fining villagers who let their animals loose to eat chakata and other fruits.
Urban dwellers continuously tango with banking queues, the product of an erratic, dishonest, inconsistent, psychopathic monetary policy being brewed at Samora Machel Avenue.
The pursuance of haphazard, ill-baked monetary measures by Reserve Bank governor, Gideon Gono have done more harm to this country than 28 years of Mugabe’s rule. The printing of money and the vicious assault on the Zimbabwe dollar by unleashing RBZ agents to buy money on the black market has ensured the death of the measures Gono is attempting to execute. The net result is inflation that exceeds 200 million per cent, a Zimbabwe dollar that is not worth the cost of printing, a banking system on the verge of collapse and a Frankenstein economy.
In short, the RBZ has redefined economic failure and economic bastardisation. They have shown that there is no such thing as a breaking point or tipping point in African economies. That collapse is as elusive as the horizon.
It is the collapse of the public education system that is unpardonable. Education is the fundamental foundational matrix upon which a new Zimbabwe can be built. This regime understands that more than anyone else, which is why in the first decade of Independence it spent 3per cent of its GDP on education. The result was massive enrolment of students and extensive capitalisation, particularly in the rural areas.
Zimbabwe, with a literacy rate of 85 per cent, is second only to Tunisia and more citizens hold degrees per capita than Kenya, Ghana or Nigeria.
Sadly, the crème de la crème of our education system has been sucked up in the diaspora.
That this regime is allowed to kill the education system is unacceptable, especially considering that the majority of government officials have their children in schools and universities outside Zimbabwe.
For five years Gono has been allowed to run amok, dabbling in quasi-fiscal activities. These activities have seen him become the de-facto prime minister of the land. In 2008 alone, he has spent over US$150 million in the farm mechanisation programme. He also spent millions of dollars bankrolling the Zanu (PF) campaign in the March 2008 election.
Gono could easily have saved the 2008 education year. He didn’t because there is no immediate short-term benefit for Zanu (PF), teachers are perceived to be MDC territory and his children are not in the system anyway.
We have made the point over and over again that nationalism has a limited agenda; captured in the slogan one-man, one-vote.’
Faced with the frustration of failing to transform the colonial state during the national democratic stage of the struggle, nationalism degenerates and decomposes into neo-patrimony, clientelism, the imperial presidency and patronage. It converts the country into a rogue state where violence, corruption and personal accumulation become vehicles for the continued reproduction of the state.
The Abhurian State is brilliantly described by Ngugi wa Thiongo in The Wizard of the Crow, Chinua Achebe in A Man of the People, Sembene Ousmane in The Last of the Empire and Ayi Kwei Armah in The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born.
Nationalism needs to be saved from itself or it will take the nation with it. That is exactly where Zimbabwe is at the present moment. Zanu (PF) needs to be saved from itself or it will annihilate the construct that Zimbabwe is.
The September 15, 2008 agreement must be seen in this context. Zanu (PF), which can’t see beyond its nose, continues to frustrate that agreement by making demands that will reduce the MDC to an innocent and disinterested bystander.
For us in the MDC, we are fully aware of the historical duties on our shoulders and will do everything to save this agreement. However, our elasticity is only marginal. – BY TENDAI BITI
If you had like to know more about the fall of the education system in Zimbabwe visit this link http://www.infobake.com/fall/