Zimbabwe's once-proud schools face ruin Times (UK) Date posted:Tue 1-Jun-2004 Date published:Tue 1-Jun-2004
Back to previous page		Many parents have withdrawn their daughters from school and are skipping meals to pay for their sons Jan Raath in Chegutu There are no books, no chalk and little hope as children are forced out of class Deep in the Zimbabwean bush, 65 miles west of Harare, four teachers start each day by washing goat droppings from their primary school’s concrete floor. They have no textbooks, no stationery and no chalk; marks on a blackboard show where a teacher has tried to write with charcoal. There are benches and tables for only ten children: the rest are told to bring sacks for seating. In the winter, a cold wind sweeps through the broken windows. Three quarters of the 176 pupils have been sent home until their parents can pay the 50p term fees. “The school has no money. Without the fees, we can do nothing,” said the headmaster, who asked not to be named. A teacher added: “We ask the children to give us their chewing gum so we can stick pictures on the wall.” This school serves the children of peasants who have settled on white-owned farms seized during President Mugabe’s chaotic land reform programme, but there are schools in an equally parlous state all over a country that once boasted the best education system in Africa. Five years of economic collapse, political oppression and rampant lawlessness, compounded by the scourge of Aids, are threatening to deprive an entire generation of Zimbabwean children of any meaningful schooling. In 1979 there were 893,000 schoolchildren in white-ruled Rhodesia. At independence a year later Mr Mugabe, himself a former teacher, launched a remarkable expansion drive that saw three million children attending school by 1987. As recently as 2000, primary school enrolment was 93 per cent, the highest in Africa. But the figure had slumped to 65 per cent by last year, according to Unicef. Literacy among schoolchildren, once 86 per cent, is plummeting and drop-out rates are soaring. In addition, the land seizures have forced 121,000 children of commercial farm workers out of school. “If the current situation continues, we will lose a whole generation,” Cecile Baldeh, Unicef’s project officer in Zimbabwe, said. Mr Mugabe has just awarded himself a 2,500 per cent pay increase and offered tribal chiefs £2.7 million and free cars in return for their loyalty in parliamentary elections next March. Yet the Government can barely pay its 109,000 teachers and has abandoned the maintenance and development of urban state schools, let alone those in the bush. Cranborne High School, in a middle-class area of Harare, was built in the 1960s as a model British comprehensive school, with a large assembly hall, fully equipped gymnasium, competition-standard swimming pool and an art and design centre. Today it is a desolate place, reeking of urine. The pool is a yard deep in algae, the rugby posts are buckled and all the gym equipment has been stolen. In the woodwork rooms, only the vices remain, bolted to the tables. The hall is coated in dust and grime. Classroom windows have been smashed and doors torn off their hinges. “It only started getting like this five years ago,” a senior teacher said. Most ordinary Zimbabweans can no longer afford to educate all their children. Faced with a 500 per cent inflation rate, many parents have withdrawn their daughters from school and are skipping meals to pay for their sons. Ephrage Ndzinga, 49, has put three children through their O levels by hawking vegetables in suburban Harare, but has four more to go. “One of them is doing O levels this year, so I have to make sure his fees are paid up, otherwise he cannot write the examination,” he said. “The younger ones are not paid, so they were chased from school. It is the same for my four brothers and their children.” The impact of the Aids epidemic is increasingly felt in the classroom. Unicef says that 25 per cent of teachers are HIV-positive and in six years’ time 38,000 will have died. At Mhuriimwe school in Seke, a seething dormitory township just south of Harare, almost 100 of the 600 children are Aids orphans, and most of the rest have only one parent, said a teacher, who asked not to be named. A £380,000 state programme to keep 800,000 Aids orphans and other disadvantaged children in school for the rest of the year ran out in March. Teachers have been blamed for infecting 11 and 12-year-old pupils with HIV and heavy drinking and serial absenteeism have become widespread in the profession. Political repression makes the job even harder. “Teachers are conceived of as the opposition,” Macdonald Mangauzani, treasurer of the Progressive Teacher’s Union, said. Shortly before the presidential elections in 2002, 30 schools around the country were closed by supporters of the ruling party. Stan Mudenge, the Foreign Minister, told a teachers’ meeting: “You can even be killed for supporting the Opposition.” Hundreds of teachers fled as their colleagues were abducted and tortured. Raymond Majongwe, the union’s leader, led a strike for higher pay in October 2002. He was arrested, detained illegally for a week, assaulted and tortured. He says that secret police are deployed in disguise as teachers in most high schools. “You have to be careful what you say in the staffroom,” he said. Even Zimbabwe’s 80 private schools are under threat. Last month Aeneas Chigwedere, the Education Minister, closed them all, even though most have an 80 per cent black enrolment. He had a dozen head teachers arrested on the grounds that they were “racist” and were trying to exclude black pupils by charging high fees. Most reopened after dropping their fees to unsustainable levels. “The impact [of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse] is worse on children than it is in any other sector of society,” Mrs Baldeh said. “For the child to be bearing the brunt of it all is shameful.”