But Education, Sport, Arts and Culture minister Senator David Coltart said government would not get rid of the temporary teachers as they were crucial to the education sector.Raymond Majongwe, the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) secretary-general said a survey by the organisation recently revealed that 70% of schools in Matabeleland were occupied by temporary teachers owing to the collapse of infrastructure that has caused qualified staff to shun the area.
“Our teams were confronted with a catastrophic situation. In districts such as Lupane and Binga temporary teachers were literally running the schools,” he said.
“In some places it was discovered that the only qualified person was the school head and the rest were temporary teachers and that is the main reason the schools perform badly in examinations, for example last year.”
He also attributed the poor performance of schools to revelations by the survey that very few teachers from Matabeleland were being recruited by the Zimbabwe School Examination Council to mark final year exams.
“Teachers need to teach as well as mark so that they can be in a position to determine the strengths and weaknesses of their pupils. But our report indicated that few teachers from Matabeleland are recruited for marking,” said Majongwe.
Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association (Zimta) chief executive officer, Sifiso Ndlovu added: “We currently have close to about 13 000 temporary teachers in the country. This is a high figure compared to our needs to have qualified teachers availed to every student.”
According to rankings by Zimsec for the November 2011 examinations, no school in Matabeleland made it into the top 10 in the ‘A’ Level category while only five schools from the three regions made it into the top 50 in the ‘O’ Level category.
While teacher unions blame the poor performance on the staffing of schools with temporary teachers, some Bulawayo-based analysts cited colonialism and government neglect of Matabeleland schools since the early 1980s during the Gukurahundi disturbances.
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“When secondary schools came, they were very sparse, for example, early students in Matabeleland had to go to Kutama and later Goromonzi. These restrictions limited the number of learners who reached tertiary education,” said Dr Samukele Hadede.
“Colonial government built only one university and naturally Salisbury then was the beneficiary. At independence, there was no university in the whole of Matabeleland region and establishing one after was not an easy battle.”
After independence, government intensified the education-for-all po-licy through building schools but very few were built in Matabeleland and some were later destroyed during Gukurahundi, Hadede argued.
‘Government must revisit policy on language of instruction’
Pastor Anglistone Sibanda of Bulawayo said there was improper implementation of the government education policy of 1988 which states that Grade 1 to 4 pupils should be taught in their mother tongue.
“The idea is that children easily grasps issues in their mother tongues at an early age but we have incidents in schools where students at these grades and up to Grade 7 are not taught in their mother tongue,” he said.
“What that means is that those students will lag behind and will eventually fail leading to the continued poor performance of schools in examinations.”
Thabani Nyoni, the Bulawayo Agenda Executive Director also said Matabeleland schools never fully recovered from the army crackdown in Matabeleland during the Gukurahundi era.
“Gukurahundi sponsored the destruction of education infrastructure at schools. While other regions were getting funding to develop education, the region was under the hammer and they have lagged behind since then,” he said.
