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NewsDay

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Dokora should avert teachers strike

Opinion & Analysis
Teachers across the country have threatened to down their tools when schools open next week to press for better working conditions.

Teachers across the country have threatened to down their tools when schools open next week to press for better working conditions.

Their concerns include termination of salaries for over 3 000 teachers, who were not present at their work stations during a recent human resources audit by the Primary and Secondary Education ministry at the instigation of the Civil Service Commission.

This came after government in April embarked on a physical head count of teachers throughout the country in an exercise meant to flush out ghost workers. As a result of the exercise, government withheld salaries for 3 000 teachers registered as absent at their respective stations.

The timing for the massive teachers’ nationwide strike is meant to coincide with the start of the school calendar next Tuesday. If the strike goes ahead, then this could negatively affect millions of schoolchildren.

Lazarus Dokora
Lazarus Dokora

It is crucial to state that teachers have not gone to the picket lines in Zimbabwe for years now, but the economic decline presided over by Zanu PF’s hegemony has left millions with nothing or very little to anticipate.

Hence, Primary and Secondary Education minister Lazarus Dokora should engage teacher’s unions to avert the impending disaster. Although Dokora, as most Zanu PF ministers, appears detached from reality, it is about the future of the country which needs to be safeguarded.

There is no doubt that Dokora lives in cloud cuckoo land. However, we urge him to exercise some sense of urgency in dealing with the teachers’ grievances in the short-to-medium term. Our children must not be affected. In fact they should not be paying the price of these protests.

So government must be more than willing to dialogue with the concerned parties and avoid unnecessary strikes. The sad reality is that the teacher’s unions have in the past accused the government of hypocrisy. It appears the government is neglecting teachers yet it has money to cater for luxuries, and gallivanting by the Executive. Instead of suppressing the planned strike, government should understand that this standoff highlights the country’s education challenges.

Suffice to say non-existent or poor public school infrastructure has, along with poor teachers’ remuneration, been a major barrier to improving access to public primary and secondary education in the country.

Most infrastructure at schools in the countryside are in a dilapidated state and no incentive is being given to the trained teachers sacrificing their lives in the poor communities, but they are expected to give their all.

Most schools’ structures are poorly maintained due to lack of resources and this affects the concentration of learners and ultimately, their performance in public examinations.

The teachers’ problems, coupled with poor, inadequate learning materials, and ineffective ways to measure learning outcomes, results in low quality education in many of the country’s public schools. We believe that vibrant economies and creative democracies cannot be built when our teachers are being mistreated and when the majority of our children cannot read and count well.

As inequalities — between the rich and poor, urban and rural — get reinforced, social cohesion that Zimbabwean desperately needs is also put at stake.