Incomprehensible rural school fees
Well I have not been able to put finger to keyboard for ever so long as the situation in this benighted nation has me reeling in pain. The topic of conversation in every household is the spiraling cost of every single item needed to live a normal life and I despair at the plight of those who are unable to purchase the most basic of goods.
The city streets are positively funereal as we all mourn the death of a nation. My questions is when will it all end, or more to the point, will it all end? How much longer till there is cause for a smile?
Gogo Selina, our beloved domestic worker, once again became a victim of the system with the reopening of schools in January. With a tribe of dependents cast upon her as a result of the death of 3 of her children, 2 to aids and 1 to malaria, she is having to work long beyond her retirement age. Rural school fees may seem insignificant to anyone outside our borders but to her these amounts are incomprehensible. Added to basic fees she has to put the children in uniform, buy their stationery, buy their text books, feed them and tend to their health needs.
Let me illustrate what her costs, for education alone, were in January:
School fees Primary School: $350 000
Levy: $250 000
School fees Secondary School: $600 000
Levy: $400 000
Uniform: $3 000 000
Text books: $2 000 000
Stationery and exercise books: $1 000 000
(Government no longer supplies exercise or text books as they did in the good old days)
Gogo has 5 grandchildren in primary school and 4 in secondary school.
For January Selina had to fork out the grand total of: $61 000 000. (For those of you who are not used to dealing in so many zeros that is $61 million!)
Contrary to government declarations, which we all know are government lies, that no child would be turned away from school for non-payment of fees, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Zimbabwean children at home, not receiving their basic human right to education. Beam, a government programme that is meant to cover the educational costs of orphans and the seriously underprivileged has collapsed, with most schools declaring that the fees promised them by the Ministry concerned have not been forthcoming for almost two years now.
Zimbabwe’s schools operate on a shoe string budget, to say the least, and our teachers are demoralized, depressed and impoverished, constantly harassed if they display an interest in democracy, overwhelmed by classes of up to 45 children, classrooms (if there are rooms at all) with no furniture, no chalk, no paper, no crayons, no paint and on and on.
Each day our teaching fraternity is forced to face children whose bellies growl with hunger, hair falling out and skin patchy with loss of pigmentation from malnutrition and in many cases, eyes glazed as they are close to starvation. There is an alarming number of children who will suffer developmental setbacks due to poor nutrition, but our president tells them to eat potatoes. But it is impossible to grasp the whole picture, so let me go back to Gogo’s plight. One of her grandchildren is HIV positive, so she needs to be on ARV’s – no problem as the Ministry of Health had said she was eligible for the programme, and she started on them last year. Come January, Gogo went off to the clinic to get the child’s tablets, only to be told that the clinic had run out. When would they have them? Nobody knows. I did not know that once the medication is halted for any period of time they cannot go back on to the same cocktail of drugs – hence a death sentence for this beautiful, bright, dynamic little girl. Fortunately, we were able to dash about and purchase her medication from outside of the country (black market of course).
The stories of despair in Zimbabwe are infinite but their tales go untold. Where are all our children tonight? The rain is pounding down and as welcome as this is, I wonder how many of the silent little voices of Zimbabwe’s children lie shivering, hungry and with no vision for the future.
