Muckraker has this one patriotic suggestion: since it is proving that despite being a hopeless reject in Zvimba West, Cde Ziyambi Ziyambi (ZZ) is actually a miracle man who makes the impossible possible, how about one more patriotic constitutional amendment after putting Resolution Number One into effect?
After extending Owner’s term to beyond beyond, Cde ZZ should start another constitutional amendment … one that retroactively bars anyone who has lost elections twice before from wasting people’s time by contesting in any future elections.
Actually, the amendment can also include a clause banning losers who announce their retirement from politics from making any come-backs in the future. Just like anything and everything that Cde ZZ touches in this country, Muck’s emphasis should be on the retroactive applicability of these amendments. This will effectively do the trick. The pesky boy has to be kept away — for good!
Thanks, Cde ZZ, in advance!
Stopping the robber!
Muck was shocked this week when Torerayi Moyo, the dunderhead masquerading as Education minister, announced that the government is going to reward “top-performing” schools in each province based on their 2025 examination results.
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“I am pleased to announce the launch of a new national initiative aimed at promoting and rewarding academic excellence across Zimbabwe’s education system,” Torerayi posted on his X account.
If Torerayi was qualified to be an Education minister, not a relative, he would be aware that best-performing schools are those that transform students that struggle with learning to geniuses, not those that specialise in discriminating against learners with difficulties.
These days it is not unusual to see schools, including government ones, placing clearly-worded adverts in the media announcing that they are not going to entertain any applications for Form 1 places from any pupils that got more than six points in their Grade 7 examinations.
May be we need to go back to the basics. What are schools for? Aren’t they there to educate children?
Just as Torerayi is a fraud, the formula that he says would be used to come up with the so-called best schools is dangerously fraudulent. If Muck goes around farms buying the best cattle and keeps them for a month before taking the herd for display at the Zimbabwe Agricultural Show and all his bulls “win” top prizes, even in the private forum of his warped conscience, can he celebrate the award of being best cattle breeder in the country?
The whole process is rigged right from the start when some elitist schools arrogate themselves the privilege to choose the crème de la crème of pupils, chaperone them around with minimal effort for a few years then go on to shamefully claim that they give the best education in this country.
If a school takes in a “hopeless” pupil who got 24 points at Grade 7 and in the four years (s)he is under its tutelage, it is able to transform that pupil to such an extent that they come up with 13 As at O-Level, should it not naturally be ranked as the best school in the whole country?
It should not just be a question of the school’s pass rate, but what these schools actually contributed towards the academic achievements of the pupils. Schools should not be allowed to exist to serve no useful purpose other than that of preserving their lofty egos at the expense of the future of generations.
What this discrimination does in reality is reduce levels of self-esteem in those little minds. It only makes them even more diffident later in life. It makes them feel like second-class human beings. It drains from them that fighting spirit that has made some of the great names on this planet.
Aren’t these the same strategies that the whites used to convince even old men with ashen hair and beard that they were boys in perpetuity?
Why should a whole minister join in the nonsense of allowing schools to shirk their primary responsibility in broad daylight? Schools are there to impart education to children. Full stop!
So, why then should they be allowed to cherry-pick on who to educate and who not to? Every child who comes for enrolment at a school should be taught to the best of these schools’ ability.
Muck knows with certainty that Torerayi is not aware that the world is actually moving away from examination-centred “learning” that only tests learners’ cramming skills, to holistic learning that seeks to identify and develop a learner’s best skills and abilities to best contribute to the development of the world and humanity.
Learning had been in existence since the beginning of time, way before Henry Fischel invented his silly trick that is called “examination” about 150 years ago, which many advanced countries have discovered its serious flaws and are moving away from.
“The school is in danger of being transformed into a ‘one product’ factory, the product being students who could pass standardised tests designed to measure a narrow bandwidth of knowledge and test-taking skills,” highlighted social scientist and anthropologist James C Scott, in his book Two Cheers for the Anarchist.
“The question of the validity of the tests — whether they measure what they purport to measure — is in great doubt. That students can be trained to perform better by drills and by cramming makes it unclear what underlying knowledge or skills the tests measure. They have been shown to consistently underpredict the subsequent performance of women, of African Americans, and of pupils whose first language is not English.
“Above all, the alienation that high-stakes, test-driven education encourages threatens to give millions of youngsters a lifelong vaccination against school learning altogether.”
Torerayi, as his name says, is effectively taking away Zimbabwean children’s right to proper education. He should stop it … peremptorily!
Same feathers
Being a graduate of the Chitepo School of (Party) Ideology, Cde Doink is not disappointing. His City of Harare, that attained world-class status last year, is fast taking after the Zimbabwe Republic Police in denying exactly what it is doing.
Just like the ZRP denies mounting uncoordinated roadblocks, extorting motorists to fill its Extortion Fund (and its officers’ back pockets), and needlessly impounding cars, Town House issues social media statements denying its municipal police details — it deploys without uniforms — are on missions to rob residents, especially motorists. How often do we see truckloads of men and women in civilian clothes crammed in city traffic trucks causing havoc on the streets? And when they cause deaths — as they did recently — they are quick to issue statements absolving themselves of any wrongdoing.
That’s what happens when lawlessness becomes more lucrative than law enforcement.
Anyway, what can one expect from municipal workers that go for months without getting paid? As admission of failure, this week Cde Doink decided to be of service to residents one last time … by urging them to leave the city before sunset lest they drown in the dark and flooded city streets.
Only a few weeks ago, he was all over the social media posting pictures of his staff making a show of stopping the roasting of green mealies in the CBD, yet it’s going on. He also posted about the programme to unblock drainage pipes, yet even after some light showers the streets turn into inland lakes.
Just as in the case of the ZRP, those social media statements appear to be targeted at netizens abroad, not the real Zimbos on the ground.