Tapiwa Nyamweda raises her hand timidly to respond to questions while seated on baking sands in what passes for a classroom at Dambudzo Primary School.
BY BLESSED MHLANGA
Dambudzo is a council-owned school in Kwekwe’s high-density suburb of Mbizo.
For Nyamweda, school starts at 12pm, by which time her peers from other schools in the low-density areas would be starting swimming, tennis or hockey lessons.
Dambudzo Primary School, with an enrollment of 1 417 pupils, is not the only school which has to conduct classes under trees in this mining town.
Several other schools have also resorted to this “hot-sitting” arrangement in order to cope with the influx of students that continue to pile pressure on the few inadequately resourced schools.
The schools do not receive any funding from government and depend on levies collected from the poor parents in the community of Kwekwe, where people are losing jobs in their hundreds as companies continue to close.
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According to Midlands education director Agnes Gudo, educational infrastructure in the province is in a sorry state.
Some schools, she said, especially in the rural areas, did not even have critical facilities like toilets. She said Early Childhood Education (ECD) was especially compromised because of this lack of adequate infrastructure.
“We also do not have resources such as vehicles to effectively run these institutions because government has failed to provide them,” Gudo told Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa recently.
Midlands has 637 primary schools, 132 of them being satellite schools found on farms expropriated from white farmers at the height of the controversial land reform programme.
About 32 of them have had to enrol students that double their capacity, resulting in the hot-sitting programme being initiated to accommodate the many children.
During a visit at Zivombvu Seconday school in Silobela in the inclusive government era, then minister of Education David Coltart was shocked to find a single two classroom block housing nearly 150 students from Form 1 to 4.
Coltart then said he had sourced over $60 million to build infrastructure, mostly in rural schools in order to improve the quality of learning.
But the situation at Zivombvu is still bad, so much that when it rains, students cannot attend classes as the entire student population, together with their teachers must find shelter from the rain in the two classrooms.
There are no textbooks at most of the satellite schools, just as qualified teachers are equally scarce.
Kwekwe mayor Matenda Madzoke lamented the sorry state of schools in the town, saying lack of investment spelt doom for future generations.
He said the shortage of formal schools was the major reason for the mushrooming of unregistered colleges. “The shortage of learning facilities in Kwekwe has forced many of our pupils to fall victim to illegal colleges, which do not even have basic facilities,” Madzoke said.
At Riverside Primary School — 10km outside Kwekwe — lessons are conducted in what used to be an ostrich meat butchery and a workshop.
According to officials, the pass rate at the school is very low as many pupils fail to attend school during the rainy season and in winter.
Midlands province recorded a 48,3% pass rate for Grade Seven results in 2013 and 55,5% in 2014, but critics said the results did not reflect the true picture of the state of education in the province.
Gudo said Midlands was also facing a serious shortage of science and maths teachers.
She urged the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education to roll-out the teacher capacity development programme in order to address the problem.
Primary and Secondary Education minister Lazarus Dokora has urged his staff to stretch themselves and achieve high-quality results, even with the little resources at their disposal.
School development committees (SDCs) have been the engines of development at various schools but their work is often hampered by ill-advised government directives.
Rio Tinto SDC secretary, Owen Matava said the freezing of school fees at a time when water, electricity, building and learning material costs were going up, did not serve the interests of the schools.
“Government has said parents should run these schools; they should therefore allow us room to do what’s best for our school,” he said.
“We cannot improve infrastructure and quality of education if the fees being paid are low and government is not subsidising anything. It is therefore government’s fault that most schools are in a sorry state,” he said.
After winning the 2013 elections, Zanu PF imposed a ceiling on school fees, accusing schools of burdening poor parents.
