Large numbers of children were on the streets, going away from school instead of towards school. They had been sent away. Had they behaved badly? No. Had they forgotten books or pens? It didn’t seem so. I asked a few of them; they had not paid their fees.
This is shocking when education is a right, and government had instructed that no child should be turned away from school for non-payment of fees, but teachers (or at least headmasters) are ignoring this instruction. What sort of teacher can deny poor children education? Isn’t this a denial of their own vocation?
But we have got used to this. We have got used to much worse. You are not sentencing a child to death when you turn him or her out of school. Hospitals that won’t treat patients who can’t pay are sentencing some of them to death.
We have got used to worse than this.
I think it was during the first junior doctors’ strike in the early 1990s that I visited some friends in a staff house at Parirenyatwa. The husband was at home. His wife, who was a doctor, was not in yet. When she came, she was exhausted and very depressed. She was in the grade just above the group who were on strike.
That day, or in the few days since the strike began (I couldn’t ask her, she was too shocked) she had seen five women die on the operating table for lack of the backup facilities those junior doctors should have provided. The staff who were at work did their best, but they could not fill all the gaps. The striking doctors were killing patients because they had not been given houses and cars as soon as they graduated. How did they square that with their Hippocratic oath “to do no harm”?
What other graduates can make such demands? Why should people who choose a service profession put their own comfort and status before the needs of the people they are supposed to serve? Are they demanding to be exempted from the economic crisis which has reduced wages to a third or less of what they were in 1980? Everyone poorer than them has to suffer that; how can they kill to demand luxuries, and kill people who can’t afford essentials?
There is something very wrong here.
It won’t be put right by making more laws. It won’t be put right by changing our constitution, or our government. Zanu (PF) forbade teachers to send children away from school for not being able to buy uniforms in the early years, to no avail.
It needs better people, not only better laws. We used to be better people, so don’t tell me that isn’t possible. There are some good teachers, doctors and nurses around, who still do their job of serving people, especially poor people, without thinking of profit.
It’s not only teachers, doctors and nurses who are heartless. What about those who fought to free our country and then 20 years later, when it was in difficulties, they could only think of grabbing for themselves a bigger slice of the shrinking national cake? What about those who can’t give a stranded traveller a place to sleep without being paid for it? What happened to unhu? By now, all of us, you readers and I myself, should be asking ourselves that question. The finger is pointing at every one of us.
How can we rebuild our traditional values, of care and respect for everyone: women and children, the old, the crippled, widows, orphans, strangers and those who are different? After we start on that, we may need to make a few laws to help us on the way, but putting detailed lists of all their rights into the constitution only provides free hotel lunches for the NGO crowd and distracts the rest of us from doing something for the disadvantaged by ourselves.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis