Harare, Zimbabwe. – World Teachers’ Day is held annually on 5 October. Inaugurated in 1994, it commemorates the signing of the 1996 UNESCO/ILO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers, which is a standard-setting instrument that addresses the status and situations of teachers globally. World Teachers’ Day focuses on appreciating, assessing and improving the educators of the world and provision of an opportunity to consider issues related to teachers and teaching.
2018 Theme: “The right to education means the right to a qualified teacher.” This emphasises the centrality of trained and qualified teachers in order to achieve quality public education.
While globally teachers are celebrating international guidelines for the recruitment and employment of teachers or the promotion of a quality environment for education, the situation is different in Zimbabwe. Worse still our commemoration of such a day would be delayed due to the current ban of gatherings as a result of the cholera pandemic. Indeed in Zimbabwe teachers are mourning the demise of the teaching profession from grace to grace with monotonous regularity.
Teachers in Zimbabwe are overworked, lowly paid, poorly provisioned, constantly denigrated and ridiculed by education and Zimsec officials. The recent defective salary discrepancies and atrocious economic reforms and liquidity crisis have made teachers in Zimbabwe the poorest of the poor. Their accommodation is atrocious, security greatly compromised, and are subjected to attacks and extortion. They are not afforded the opportunity to engage in meaningful collective bargaining with their employer as envisaged in ILO Conventions 87, 98 and 151. The curriculum is narrow and constricted and there is very limited engagement of teachers in educational policy formulation and implementation.
It is against this background that Ptuz calls for:
-Binding collective bargaining as opposed to collective begging
-Payment of competitive salaries to motivate teachers to do their work
-Legislation to ensure that schools are politics free zones
-Protection of teachers against attacks, denigration and extortion
-The establishment of an atonomous Teaching Professions Council
– A broad and balanced curriculum that can impart life skills in order to transform Zimbabwe into a leading processing and manufacturing hub of agricultural and mineral based products as opposed to the current constricted, acidic and anarchic curriculum that stifles talents of learners
-Provision of land for teachers’ accommodation
-Empowerment of teachers to engage in research and publication of textbooks for use in schools.
-Rural and hardship allowance for teachers teaching in rural areas
-Remuneration for invigilating public examinations
-An end to government’s ill advised austerity measures
-Timeous payment of annual bonus
As a teachers’ union we will continue to relentlessly define, initiate and defend an appropriate Status of Teachers and Education system in Zimbabwe. We reiterate that teachers are a vital cog of societal development and must be treated well. On a day when focus is on international best practice, we remind the government that it remains the biggest threat to the development of the education system in the country by ill-treating teachers.
Venceremos
Dr Takavafira M. Zhou
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