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Obey Sibanda
THAMSANQA Ncube, 34, is a local “hero” to many youths in Mapati village, Gwanda District, Matabeleland South province. The easygoing pleasure-seeking young man is a high school dropout now living in South Africa is in the habit of buying beer for everyone, including his former headmaster and teachers. As he quietly sips his cold beer on a hot afternoon sitting in the corner of a bar, the bald-headed Ncube — donning a black leather jacket and dark spectacles — has very little to show that his roots are in this village. He speaks IsiZulu while his limited English vocabulary is flavoured with a South African accent.
A group of villagers is literally kowtowing to the whims of the injiva who has become the envy of many youths in Mapati area. Ncube (not his real name) was doing Form Two in 1997 when he hooked up with a group of former students, also high school dropouts, and started leading a life of crime.
His friends were also known gangsters in the community. In no time, Ncube who could barely read or write, had become a hardcore criminal “recruiting” his classmates into the gang. One of his former teachers said Ncube started playing truant while still in Form Two as he felt that school had nothing to offer except humiliation.
“Half the time the police would come to the school to take Ncube and his crew to the police station. They would reprimand them and let them go. They would often get away with a few strokes. Ncube was a regular at the headmaster’s office as he would come for canning,” said the teacher. Later in the same year, Ncube, together with his school dropout friends, skipped the country to South Africa where they graduated into the system of making a “quick-buck”.
There are high figures of school dropouts in most parts of rural Zimbabwe. While in most provinces the dropouts are mainly due to economic reasons, many youths in Matabeleland North and South quit school mainly to seek employment or pursue fast lives in South Africa. Villagers living near the border areas say their children do not have proper role models to look up to which would encourage them to take their studies seriously resulting in them erroneously concluding that the best life was on the other side of the Limpopo River.
Mjalifa Nyathi, the Imbizo Secondary School Development Committee (SDC) Chairperson, said the lack of incentives for pupils and motivation was driving pupils to South Africa. “Most students despite being in class are chronically disengaged from school. The lack of positive role models has turned most of our youths into a bunch of disrespectful, lazy, spoilt, ambitionless individuals.
In this part of the district we glorify injiva (Zimbabweans working in South Africa) to the extent that they have become heroes in the villages. The majority of people in the villages are not educated. Nurses, police officers and teachers, to mention but a few, hardly get recognition maybe because of their miserable salaries and poor living standards,” said Nyathi. He said the lack of local role models and career guidance are intricately interwoven in Gwanda rural.
Parents who do not hold certificates or diplomas in higher education face serious challenges in playing the positive academic role model, Nyathi argued. “Even in the classroom, very few teachers are locals. It’s easy for our children to be inspired if the teachers speak the same language with them. The majority of the teachers deployed to our area are from outside the province. When young people fail to get a positive mentor in a school setting or community, there will always be an injiva to look up to,” he said.
Nyathi is of the view that the situation could improve if the province deploys teachers who are connected to the province and have pupils’ welfare at heart. Imbizo High School has embarked on an ambitious adult education programme targeting school drop outs. The programme also seeks, in the long run, to help spruce up Gwanda district’s image battered by youths who choose to do menial jobs in neighbouring South Africa instead of education.
Since the programme commenced, some of the adult students did well in their studies and successfully enrolled in tertiary institutions. “The idea is to increase the number of educated people in the district. We are focusing on the core subjects like Maths, Science and English. We are fortunate that we are the only school in Gwanda South with a qualified Maths teacher, hence we are taking full advantage of this.
“We also engage retired teachers to come and assist our teaching staff because we have between six and seven teachers, which is the minimum we can engage as our enrolment stands at 273,” said Nyathi. Since time immemorial, the lure of a good life in South Africa has been a problem in Matabeleland region.
The late regional education director for Matabeleland South Province, Glory Makwati, bemoaned the “exodus” of school going children to South Africa, causing a premature end to their education. He said children no longer valued education as they were enticed by electrical gadgets brought home by their peers working in the neighbouring country.
A headmaster of a school in the province who spoke on condition of anonymity condemned the high dropout rate of pupils in schools. He attributed the problem to the issue of most pupils in the region being first generation pupils. “First generation pupils are kids from a family where no one has completed Ordinary level before. These low income first generation pupils are likely to drop out of school. They are faced with two conflicting spheres of influence; the school culture and the family culture.
“Each culture has its own set of expectations, rules and demands. Without support, it can be difficult for pupils to navigate the challenges of the school and face sometimes conflicting demands,” said the headmaster. Two in every five children who enrol for high school fail to complete level, according to education experts in the two Matabeleland provinces. Kabelo Moyo, a Form Four pupil at Mambale Secondary School, said teachers must come up with strategies that will motivate pupils.
“Rewarding actions that pupils can control such as completing homework, reading a book or solving a mathematical problem yields better results than rewarding an individual pupil who comes out tops in a class or stream as this only benefits those who are academically gifted,” said Kabelo. Six schools in Matabeleland South province recorded zero percent pass rate in Grade Seven results in 2013. Shockingly, officials said it was an improvement. In 2012 an astonishing 16 of the 107 primary schools in the province failed to produce a single pass.
Secondary schools also were not spared. Twenty schools out of 134 in Matabeleland South recorded a zero pass rate at Ordinary level in 2013, with Umzingwane High school being among five of the worst performing schools. The province recorded a 1.1 percent increase in pass rate to 23.86 percent compared to 21.75 percent recorded in 2012. Chief Bango of Mangwe district expressed concern over schools and educators’ failure to reach out and support disengaged and academically challenged pupils.
The traditional leader demanded a paradigm shift in attitudes among educators to curb the high school drop-out figures.
“Our children are let down by unprofessional teachers and leaders who lack commitment and dedication to the future of our province. A whole generation of unemployable youth is being produced in schools, not because they are incapable but because they are not being nurtured by professionals in the classroom. The classroom tends to favour the academically gifted,” said Chief Bango.
He appealed to the government to establish more vocational training centres to provide alternatives to the academically challenged pupils and equip them with practical skills. According to YHIYF, a non-governmental organisation, about 3,000 children drop out of school in Matabeleland South yearly. Statistics claim that Gwanda has the highest number of pupils dropping out of school.
Last year, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) conducted a research on the literacy of men aged 15 to 24 countrywide. Literacy was assessed on the ability of the respondent to read in full a short simple statement for those with primary level of education or based on school attendance for those respondents who had attended at least a secondary school. The lowest literacy levels were recorded in Matabeleland South province with 72.7 percent followed by Matabeleland North at 76.4 percent. The study showed that literacy levels decrease with the decrease of the wealth of a household.
The same survey focusing on women of the same age group revealed that Matabeleland North had the least literate levels at 86.8 percent followed by Mashonaland Central Province at 87.2 percent. Mat South was third with 89.7 percent.
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