Chronicle Editor
Stephen Mpofu, Pespective
When the dizzying rampaging Covid-19 virus finally reaches a dead end — if it does, indeed, surrender to the medical and human counter-attack while our hobbley planet earth glides on its axis — the world pandemic scourge will leave behind a Zimbabwe that boasts one of the highest literate nations in Africa, a divided history of a school-age population of literate urban dwellers against a rural population with peripheral education that has little to contribute to the country.
“Our children in rural areas are doing nothing with schools closed under the current lockdown,” a parent and former schoolteacher said in Jerera, Zaka this week. “They will resort to criminal acts as they have nothing to occupy themselves with.”
The man who preferred anonymity, said the Government as well as rural communities should come up with possible solutions to the plight of the children who, because of being far flung from urban centres that boast modern communications media, from which to benefit educationally have nothing to do.”
A primary school teacher at a mission school in Masvingo particularly bemoaned the plight of Grade Seven pupils who will write their final year examinations under the new curriculum introduced this year but have nowhere to go for lessons to prepare for the final exams.
“These pupils do not know their teacher, and vice versa, since schools have remained shut when they ought usually to have been opened at the beginning of this month and so the kids remain in a dilemma,” she said, also preferring to be unnamed.
Deeply concerned, like other teachers in remote, rural areas where pupils cannot access lessons through radio as few parents can afford the expensive electronic gadgets, she said it would help a great deal if donors provided aid in the form of learning gadgets to rural schools for pupils to access as parents with no substantial incomes of their own could not afford those expensive gadgets.
Besides, she added, those villagers owning radios could not keep them switched on long enough for their children to access lessons because of the high cost of electricity, not to mention the inability of some remote areas to access radio signals.
An official at the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in Harare said “we are very concerned” about the difficulties faced by pupils in very remote parts of the country accessing lessons through the radio.
To help, the ministry had distributed a self-help study guide, a handbook that gave students guidelines in accessing the material for their studies while schools remain shut.
In the circumstances, the call for donor intervention made above by one of the teachers appears urgent and imperative to help ease difficulties faced by thousands of pupils in the countryside who have difficulties receiving education by radio or other electronic media.
However, Zimbabwe can do without political-visibility aid from foreigners intent on gaining easy access to plunder and curt off this country’s rich mineral resources.
Zimbabwe badly needs good-Samaritan aid as that form of international assistance is rooted on deep love.
Such aid will obviously bail Zimbabwe from the diabolic economic embargo imposed on our country by an imperialist West eager to exact slavish subservience from a proud people now engaged in self-determination after breaking the yoke of racist colonialism by some people from the very West.
Zimbabwe shall not die and so any foreign countries and organisations that come to this country’s aid in its time of need economically and educationally, and Unicef is involved in the latter, are our all-weather friends and this pen says “hooray! ,hooray!” to them.
Online Reporter