Teachers’ Elasticity Has Reached a Breaking Point
17 September 2020
Revolutionary greetings comrades and friends. Admittedly, government has overstreached teachers’ patience and elasticity that has now reached a breaking point. Only a few days before public schools open, there is no clarity over improvement of salaries and conditions of service.
What is inherently clear is that teachers have all tested positive to poverty and unless there is a concerted effort to address this long standing issue, teachers would be incapacited to report for work on 28 July 2020.
Yet sound as this appears, gvt has been prevaricating since its flitation with moribund, obsolete and archaic Apex Council in Victoria Falls in February 2020.
Worse still Apex Council’s unprocedural extension of mandate has even expired, but gvt is still closeted to romance with it for fire fighting escapades instead of addressing the plight of teachers. Gvt is therefore taking teachers as if they are of no account.
Government has also been arrogant to the extent of introducing discrepancies among its employees with effect from June 2020 under what Presidential spokesperson, Charamba, called presidential prerogative.
That presidential prerogative is at best a fantasy and at worst a dangerous threat to security of the country and teaching profession. Teachers’ salaries have remained pegged at $3800 to $4500 at a time when sectors that hitherto earned less than teachers incresed to $8000-$19000 and $9000-$20 000.
Gvt salaries are determined by qualifications, years of experience, responsibility and promotion. It is puzzling that the qualifications, responsibility, promotions and years of experience of teachers have suddenly been rendered useless by the new dispensation. Teachers will certainly not accept a new dispensation of excessive poverty and penury, let alone their fall with monotonous regularity from grace to grass.
Worse still, it is painful to receive starvation wages at a time the gvt is declaring surplus as expressed by Finance Minister, Mthuli Ncube. Lest we forget the teachers’ salary has plummeted from US$520-US$550 under Mugabe to the current US$35 under President Mnangagwa.
There is virtually nothing that reflect prioritisation of teachers and pupils’ health and safety a few days before schools open. As much as gvt claims to have released more than $600 million, that money has not filtered to schools with zero budget balances that have crippled any meaningful preparation for reopening by the 28th of September.
It is also clear that gvt is trying to evade the testing of over one million students who are candites, 136 000 teachers and 50 000 ancillary staff. Neither has gvt acquired covid abatement equipment (testing kits, thermometers, sanitisers, masks etc), let alone distributed these to nearly 10000 schools. Gvt homelitic bellicose and rhetoric of preparedness, therefore, leaves the lives of teachers and students at the vagaries of the deadly pandemic and must be resisted by all level headed Zimbabweans.
To the teachers the time to unite against cold and calculated educational vandalism is now. Now is the time to agree that we may differ ideologically, but must unite in defence of our lives, inalienable dignity, lustre and future of the profession.
We are in essence arbiters of a nation’s destiny and must therefore play our vital cog of guaranteeing a better future. We therefore urge all teachers across the union and non union divide to sharpen their instruments of incapacitatiom combat and collectively send it clanking into gear at an opportune time.
We cannot accept to be treated in a degrading, callous and servitude manner. Our legitimate battle must never be politicised as in essence it stems from a monument of Zimbabwean labour injustice.
Our health, safety and welfare matter. No one must experiment with the lives of teachers and pupils. Rather than agonising let teachers mobilise and get organised or else we will perish as fools.
Venceremos
Dr Takavafira M. Zhou (Ptuz President)
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