adminPerspective Stephen Mpofu
That a fire could start and grow into a conflagration, while locals passively peeled their eyes at it, until the smoke spreads hundreds of kilometres away to draw the attention of the people in the seat of officialdom, not only boggles the mind; it is tragic to say the least.
That is the crisis in which thousands of primary and secondary school-going children in Matabeleland South province have dropped out with some seeking employment at mines in the province to earn money for themselves, and with young girls getting married, in a desperate attempt in both cases to survive food shortages crippling the province.
The Deputy Minister of Agriculture Mechanisation and Irrigation Development responsible for crops, Cde Davis Marapira, learnt from a presentation by an official from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education during a visit in Gwanda Town earlier this week that 2 937 children from five districts in Matabeleland South have left school prematurely because of food shortages.
A frenzy for growing maize as a staple diet for the generality of Zimbabweans has lured them into starvation as that crop is not really suitable in a province that experiences perennial droughts and is popular for cattle rearing which lately has also suffered heavily as pastures have literally been wiped off by the heat belched out by the sun as a result of global warming.
Yet the starving people of Matabeleland South could rescue themselves from the quandary in which they find themselves today if they entered memory lane to discover how the people of old in that province and elsewhere survived before Portuguese explorers brought seed maize, eventually popularising it among the peasants, before pastoral farming became the in- thing on which villagers grew dependent.
If the people go on that journey back into the past they will viciously kick themselves in the groins on finding out that there is absolutely no justification for their suffering because their ancestors beat the drought by resorting to drought resistant crops.
As such the people of Matabeleland South province need a paradigm shift, perhaps even going through some inconveniences, by cultivating drought defiant crops such as sorghum, pearl millet and cow peas.
A source close to the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid-Tropics, at the Matopos, south of Bulawayo, says there is absolutely no justifiable reason why people in Matabeleland South should experience food shortages when the three crops that can withstand drought will yield bumper harvests in the affected areas.
What needs to be done therefore is to conserve water in rivers and dams for purposes of irrigation. Yes, if dams constructed on the lip since independence had been a reality, Zimbabweans would be celebrating success in the agrarian revolution by growing the right crops in ecological zones prone to drought.
Food aid is all very well only as a stop gap measure; a permanent solution lies in empowering the people with the means to forestall hunger and the people of Matabeleland South in particular, because of the importance of cattle rearing there, need water reservoirs and irrigation yesterday so that the population there has a brave new future for all.
That such large numbers of school-going children are foregoing their right to empowerment through education as future leaders of Zimbabwe should be read as an indictment first and foremost on the local political and traditional leaderships over their failure to sound the alarm early enough in order for the powers-that-be to weigh in with the necessary provisions of food so that young children in that province might continue with their education, like their peers elsewhere in the country.
In the circumstances it would be irresponsible of anyone in the province to blame the Government in Harare for not rushing to the rescue of the suffering people in time as that response, proper as it is, should have been to urgent calls from leaderships on the ground.
Be that as it may, the Government should move in swiftly and effectively and be seen to do so by way of sending in adequate food supplies and by also taking measures to send back to school dropouts whose future remains very bleak indeed.
The Government might also wish to come up with legal sanctions against parents, in particular, who give away their under-age daughters for marriage as a source of money in the form of lobola for their own upkeep while the poor little girls become slaves in marriage churning out kids with not even a hint of which to support their offspring.
Zimbabwe boasts a proud record in Africa of the highest literacy rate at 91 percent with Equatorial Guinea coming second place and South Africa in third place.
However, school dropouts, children leaving school early also because of food shortages or to make a beeline to neighbouring countries in search of jobs – bite into that high literacy rate so that if quick solutions are not found the literacy rate in future might drop drastically.
Much more seriously, we are talking here about the quality of leadership of future generations which will be diluted for lack of education with disastrous results in the performance of economic development among other critical sectors in the country.
This pen genuinely fears that if the right of children to education is not guaranteed quickly enough through the mobilisation of requisite resources for their education, a future Zimbabwe risks becoming a pale shadow of its present status in the global village and the enemy will crack a sumptuous smile at our fall.
What this suggests is that all stakeholders in the development of the girl-child and the boy-child should link arms and pool resources to make future generations the envy of the world in terms of both the quality of education and leadership in politics and the economy and in participation in international service under the United Nations as is the case today for the Zimbabwe Republic Police.
Online Reporter