By Dr Takavafira Zhou.
The enunciation that schools would open on 28 July 2020, and June Examinations would go ahead as planned is not only unfortunate but also ill-conceived and callous. This does not resonate with submissions made by teacher unions to the Ministry of Education, Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, as well as to the parliamentary portifolio committee on education, that latter on amplified the ill-preparedness of schools to write exams, let alone open. What is worrisome is that gvt has no capacity to procure, let alone deliver testing kits, thermometers, sanitizers, PPEs to 10 000 schools and for 4.6 million learners, 136 000 teachers, and 50 000 ancillary staff. Worse still gvt has done virtually nothing in terms of infrastructural development in schools and recruitment of 50 000 teachers needed to ensure social distance and a teacher-pupil ratio of 1:20.
Not surprising Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education Head Office has sent a directive to all provinces indicating that: “Please submit the number of schools in your province that through their own resources will have enough masks, liquid soap, sanitizers for themselves by 29 June 2020 as a matter of urgence.” This message has filtered down to schools with DSIs writing to school heads that: “Please submit the number of masks, amount of liquid soap and sanitizers your school would have produced in your school through your own resources for yourselves and learners by 29 June 2020 by 5pm today.” The assumption that schools have resources and gvt has no resources is dangerous and nauseating. It is our submission that it is government responsibility to ensure that all the necessary needs to guarantee the health and safety of teachers and pupils are in schools before coming up with specific opening dates. Sadly gvt has rushed to announce opening dates when it has no resources, let alone capacity to guarantee the health and safety of teachers and learners. No attempt has been made to make a covid 19 risk assessment in schools. To assume that government that has up to now tested less than 50 000 people throughout the country can test learners, teachers and ancillary staff before July 28 is to expect a miracle.
It is, therefore, clear that the government is experimenting with teachers’ and learners’ lives. It is also clear that the proclamation is informed by political rhetoric and homelitic bellicose than professional ethics and medical expertise. Worse still cases of covid 19 are increasing, while some schools are used as quarantine centres with limited prospects of their cleaning and disinfection by gvt. Our approach does not resonate with recommendations outlined by WHO and Educational Interbational and is therefore suicidal and genocidal.
Worse still nothing has been done to consider not only the safety and health of learners and teachers, but also teachers’ welfare. To expect teachers whose salaries were culled by gvt from US$550 to US$34 to exert themselves fully into serious business of teaching is to ask for too much.
Conversely, the health, safety and welfare of teachers have been totally disregarded in gvt timelines of opening schools and writing June examinations. Unless gvt puts all this in place, there would be no teachers in schools. Teachers would collectively chat a way forward to protect themselves from the vagaries of covid 19, poverty and penury. Gvt must respect engagement, logical disputation instead of going forward headlong with constricted, restricted, and suicidal decisions. Teachers of Zimbabwe unite. You have nothing to lose but your your chains, and your health, safety and welfare to protect. Nothing for teachers without teachers’ support.
Anything for teachers without them is against them and must be resisted by all means necessary. Our collective unity in knocking sense to the gvt will see us through. The only way forward for teachers at this critical juncture is collective unity in defence of our health, safety and welfare. We are in essence managers of the world’s greatest asset, viz, pupils, and can never be accomplices in the decimation of such an asset. The cause of our health, safety and welfare cannot be surrendered, even at the last moment of possible defeat. We must fight to our last atom against the pending educational terrorism which our gvt is about to execute.
Venceremos
Dr Takavafira M. Zhou (Ptuz President)
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