Teachers can rise again

Tichaona Zindoga
Over the weekend, on October 5, teachers the world over marked the World Teachers’ Day. The global theme for the day was “A Call for Teachers”, which focused on Unesco’s “Work on quality teachers for global citizenship and cultural diversity.’’ Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association president Richard Gundane had this to say: “This year’s theme seeks to call for attention on the teacher, who is responsible and accountable for the provision of quality public education, which is a crucial element to Zimbabwean society.

“Yet apart from this, there can be no prizes for guessing that, especially for Zimbabwean teacher, the prayer was for the old nobility of the profession to return. After all, quality and nobility cannot be far divorced.”

But there is something more. Nobility rests also on respectability. Respectability is what has been denuded of the profession in Zimbabwe over the last decade and more. The major reason for this has been the poor working conditions and poor remuneration.

Gone are the days when teachers commanded respect not only for the nobility of their profession an agency for enlightenment and community leadership but for being materially affluent.

Yet things changed, suddenly, and teachers lost their status as demigods. The economic situation caused their great fall and teaching was now regarded as the basest of occupations.

Yes, even the uneducated or the failed ones took succour in their new-found perception of being better than teachers, erstwhile gods!
One incident still lingers in the mind of this writer of just how far a teacher had fallen.

It will, forever. It must have been the year 2008 or thereabouts when the economic situation in Zimbabwe had broken all the wrong records as hyperinflation bit at unimaginable levels of millions. Some put the rate at a billion or so.

So on this day, as was customary, teachers at this mission school some 45 kilometres northeast of Harare had gone for their monthly pay in Harare. As they came back, dropped by the school bus which is provisioned for such trips, their faces were long, sad. Again, today, the fruits of their monthly labours were nothing more than an equivalent of US$1 or, precisely in those days, a bar of soap.

That special bar was of a brand called Elangeni, for those who care to remember. It was so that one teacher was dropped right in front of me and at hand was a little girl, his daughter, to welcome him. The little girl, so excited to see daddy, asked him what he had brought her.

His face dropped. He must have mumbled something effecting to having brought nothing.  He was empty-handed, save for a little bag he strapped on the shoulder no doubt containing wads of useless, nearly, banknotes.

You see, so high was the hyperinflation such that the value of the teacher’s pay was eroded before he even reached home, just 45km away. The man in question carried sadness. He was Sadness. Sadness was communicated to the little hitherto excited girl.

She became sad, too, as would be her mother, one would guess. That was the season. It brought disquiet and destruction and disrespect. And despair; at best, stoicism. It was during this time that teachers (and nurses from the nearby hospital) became acquainted with village beer.

They even came to know the homesteads were illicit brews were made. They became known there, too, and where the brewer harboured the last shades of respect for the good noble teachers, he would reserve some measure or two for them. Teachers in urban areas fared no better as some of them reduced/themselves to common vendors and hawkers to make ends meet.

Hard times for teachers brought them commonality and the familiarity that is known for breeding contempt. Yet teachers lived it through and they even bounced back somewhat by devising ways to stay afloat.

Only their new stratagems, like extra lessons and calling for incentives, did not particularly endear them to society. They were now regarded as anything between mercenaries and outright thieves. The second reason why over the past decade or so teaching has lost its nobility is that some teachers decided to become commissars of certain political parties.

Ironically, they aligned themselves to the very forces that invited their pauperisation at the hands of hyperinflation. Teachers became a political constituency. Teacher unions became political outfits and names like Raymond Majongwe became less identifiable with fighting for teacher labour rights than with politics.

Majongwe could have been this writer’s teacher at one Highfield school had he not morphed into a pseudo-politician and moved to his new home at the quasi-political Zimbabwe Progressive Teachers’ Union a couple of months earlier.

But all this seems to be changing now and we see Majongwe, whatever his motives, seems to have turned round to be a teacher representative again. The fact that a new Government is in place should aid teaching back to its nobility of yore.

After all, it was Zanu-PF, led by former teacher President Mugabe, that strengthened and sustained teaching nobility, before the rain of politically motivated screaming of the economy began to beat us.

Government should reward teachers not only as a due labour process but also a means of ensuring quality in the school systems, as embodied in this year’s      theme.

If Zimbabwean teachers managed to trump Africa while under extremely hard conditions to make Zimbabwe the most literate African nation, they can lead the world under better, if normal, conditions.