ZIMBABWE:An exodus of teachers to work abroad has left 150,000 vacancies that can't be filled, writes a correspondent in Mufakose, Zimbabwe
THE FIRST to go was the English teacher. Six months later, the commerce teacher followed. The next year, 2005, the trickle turned into an exodus. By 2007, the departures from Mufakose 3 High School were like bricks in a collapsing building: maths, science, accounting and many other teachers, all leaving their careers to work as cleaners, shop assistants and labourers in other countries.
Zimbabwe's education system, once the best in Africa, is being demolished teacher by teacher.
Some of the teachers at Mufakose 3, outside Harare, called in sick and were never seen at the school again. Others didn't bother to call and just disappeared. "You'd come to school and someone's not there, and next thing you hear, he's gone," said Knox Sonopai (43), a history teacher.
In 2007, 25,000 teachers fled the country, according to the Progressive Teachers' Union of Zimbabwe. In the first two months of this year, 8,000 more disappeared. A staggering 150,000 teaching vacancies can't be filled. The education ministry sends out high school graduates with no degree or experience to do the job.
In a country where the official inflation rate is 100,000 per cent, teachers simply can't afford to teach. Before last month's national elections, teachers went on strike to protest at salaries of 500 million Zimbabwean dollars a month - about €6. Their salaries went up 700 per cent to end the strike (paid, perhaps not coincidentally, just before the vote), but the raise is being gobbled up by hyperinflation.
"One hundred per cent of teachers have resigned, mentally, even though they remain in schools," said the teachers' union president, Takavafira Zhou. "They're no longer interested in teaching. They're just looking for somewhere to go."
Francis, a teacher at neighbouring Mufakose 1 High School who declined to give his last name for fear of dismissal, said 60 of 110 teachers there left last year. "Every holiday we lose more teachers," he said.
Last October history teacher Sonopai and a colleague, Clever Mudadi (33), gambled their lives crossing the crocodile-infested Limpopo River into South Africa. They tried to get work as teachers but ended up as labourers digging foundations for about $15 a week. In the end they returned home. "It was bad," Mudadi said. "We lost a lot of weight. We felt hurt. I can't describe it."
"We never expected to do that kind of work, but we had to do it," Sonopai said. "We had no option. We were stranded."
Richard Tshuma (35) said: "When you go to the shops because it is pay day for teachers, people laugh at you and say it's better to be a street vendor selling vegetables - you'll make more money."
At rallies before the elections, President Robert Mugabe made a point of giving out computers to teach children computer literacy. At Mufakose 1 High School, 10 new computers were donated last year by the government. But only one is still working, and students never get to touch it. It's been taken over by school office workers for typing letters.
In most schools, computers are a dream. Textbooks are so scarce that 35 children must share one, according to the teachers' union. Children sit crammed 80 to a classroom, sometimes on the floor.
At Mufakose 3, schoolboy Bernard Tinashe stared straight ahead with dreamy eyes as he painted a 10-year-old's vision of someone in a white coat curing the dying and the sick. He recited his hopes and dreams in a singsong classroom voice, as if learned by rote: "I-want-to-be-a- doctor-because-I-want-to-give-people-medicine-when-they're-sick. Sometimes-they-don't- get-medicine-because-in-this-country-there's-no-medicine.
To-learn-is-the-best-thing-in-Zimbabwe-so-that-you-can-be-educated-so-that-you-can-learn-something-that-you-can-do."
"School's boring," Bernard said, "because there are no teachers and we don't learn anything. You just sit and read books, but the teachers are not there. Sometimes we are just sitting on the ground or sitting waiting for our parents to come and get us, and then we'll go home." He said some of the children were mischievously delighted when classes were cancelled, but not he: "It makes me feel unhappy. I'll never get to be educated. I'll never get to be a doctor. I'm not learning."
With standards plummeting, the pass rate for the high school exams called the O-levels fell from about 70 per cent in the mid-1990s to 13 per cent last year. The higher education system is equally troubled, starving Zimbabwe's hospitals of doctors and the mining sector of engineers. Zimbabwe's mining sector, the country's last significant source of exports, needs 1,100 skilled specialists.
"The technical institutions have been smashed," said Tony Hawkins, an independent economist. "We can't regenerate our own skills. There are these myths about Zimbabwe having this highly-educated workforce. Well, we did, but they have all gone. The second myth is that they will come back with a change of government. But the more skilled you are, the less likely you are to return."