We feel betrayed: teachers

Sunday News
24th January 2010
By Mugove Mudhadha

THE recent pronouncement by the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, Senator David Coltart, that teachers should take their grievances regarding salaries to the Finance Minister Mr Tendai Biti made sad reading.

It is with a deep sense of betrayal of the teaching fraternity by the supposed “father”, Mr Coltart, that I have decided to outline what I feel are the complications and implications of this fire-fighting attempt at management.

That Minister Coltart disowned the teachers and unashamedly baton-passed them to the Finance Minister is deplorable, to say the least.

I am sure this will haunt the teaching personnel for as long as their lives will span.

Pronouncing that Mr Coltart is not the teachers’ employer only goes to expose unacceptable levels of haughtiness, insensitivity and recklessness.

We sincerely anticipated a dignified 2010, but here we are once again, in the vicious web of anxiety and uncertainty. Teacher issues remain unresolved and this talk about continued “teacher incentives” clearly shows that Mr Coltart cannot be taken as a serious father at all.

The crux of the matter is that the status of the Zimbabwean schools is heterogeneous.

There are autonomous trust schools, church-run schools, Government schools and council schools, which can be in urban, rural and peri-urban set-ups.

One observable fact is that the parents or guardians whose children learn in these different school categories are equally in varying income brackets.

This effectively means that their ability and preparedness to pay up whatever levies differ accordingly.

Those with the financial means can easily pay some of the apparently astronomical levies, but many would grieve, groan and grind to be able to pay what some schools propose as levies.

Now to the hilarious drama! There is a ministerial circular that blindly and naively advises that teachers be entitled to 10 percent of the levies.

Honestly, 10 percent of zero and 10 percent of 100 cannot be the same.

This means that teachers in schools asking for high levies are earning an average of US$300 per month, yet those in very remote areas, the rural tsetse- and mosquito-infested areas, are wallowing in poverty. Yet, these teachers were trained at the same institutions.

The traditional way of forcing parents to pay is to send their children back home, but with the plausible advent of children’s rights, this method has since been relegated into oblivion, leaving school administrators exasperated and scratching for practical ways to keep teachers motivated.

The administrators are in turn forced by situations to engage the school development associations to clandestinely come up with “internal arrangements”, thereby exposing unorthodox means in a desperate attempt to dodge the ministry’s policy.

Unfortunately, matters of principle can only be disregarded at one’s peril.

Towards the end of last year many school heads hit the headlines, albeit for the wrong reasons of embezzlement and misappropriation of funds.

As I write, some are on suspension simply because the employer decided to father the child but never to buy a napkin.

In some schools teachers are making pupils pay “agreed” amounts of money directly to the subject or class teachers, thereby irreversibly compromising the dignity and integrity of this once noble profession.

Today’s children are very quick to note any anomaly and the mischievous once are quick to whisper to each other, within the teacher’s earshot, how much money they have to the extent of being able to pay their “good-for-nothing teachers”.

Of great concern is how the supposed role model soon becomes a model of perpetual contempt.

Will the child ever listen to the teacher? Will the child then ever be a leader of tomorrow? And this is all because of an experimental remuneration system.

Experiments are best left in the science laboratories. All that is needed is a recognised means of remunerating the teachers.

Teacher incentive is a sure cocktail for teacher demoralisation and this is a one-way ticket to the reversal of the hard fought-for gains of independence.

l The writer of this article is a teacher writing under a pseudo name for professional reasons.