Any uninitiated visitor to Molo Primary School in Bubi district in Matabeleland North would be forgiven for mistaking it for a traditional settlement.

It only becomes apparent that the cluster of thatched pole and dagga huts is a school when one observes hordes of school children milling around, and the weary flag hoisted in the middle of the huts.

The school was built by resettled villagers in 2006 to save their children from travelling gruelling distances to school. Prior to the land “reform” programme, the area used to be a designated forestry area.

Coarse and squalid learning conditions for students and living conditions for teachers at this place epitomise the monumental failure of the Zani (PF) government’s land resettlement programme.

Children sit on bare dusty floors while teachers stay in single pole and dagga huts, some of them with no doors. The toilets and bathrooms are made of ramshackle plastic. The school has 323 pupils and eight teachers.

Help at last

Such is the sad story at the learning centre where both students and pupils had lost hope until last week when the Japanese government handed over four new classroom blocks and 10multi- compartment Blair toilets.

The Japanese Embassy funded the construction and furnishing of the new school to the tune of $112,000 while World Vision Zimbabwe implemented the project. The local community chipped in with labour, bricks and sand.

“We are really grateful to the people of Japan for assisting us with the construction of this school. Before this the learning environment was terrible. Pupils were sitting on logs or on the floors. One of the mud blocks collapsed early this year following heavy rains. Luckily no one was injured,” said the school’s headmaster, Fortune Moyo.

As a result of squalid learning conditions at the school, the pass rate has been very low.

Although Simelweyinkosi Ncube, a grade one teacher at the school applauded the construction of the new school, she is still worried about the squalid living conditions for teachers. “The houses and ablution facilities we are using here are not only primitive, but they also expose us to a lot of risks -especially us female teachers. We bath in shacks made of used plastic bags. Sometimes the shacks are destroyed by cattle and we are forced to bath in the open. The toilets have no doors – making it even more risky during the night,” she said.

Not secure

“In the pole and dagga classrooms, it was really difficult for teachers to write anything on the black board. During the rainy season the boards developed holes. The old classrooms were also not

 secure and every day after lessons we were forced to take our teaching materials to our cottages for safe keeping,” added Ncube.

Speaking at the handover ceremony, Japanese ambassador Yoshinobu Hiraishi expressed hope that the new school would result in greatly improved examination results.

“It is our sincere hope that the improvement of learning environment at this school for both teachers and pupils will achieve better grade results, thereby enabling pupils to proceed to secondary school and ultimately tertiary education so that they can contribute to their community and country as a whole,” he said.

School Development Committee (SDA) chairperson Shepard Dlamini said he was certain that the new school would inspire both teachers and pupils to work hard and produce quality results.

Good results

“As a community we are really grateful to the Japanese government and other stakeholders who were involved the construction of the school. Now that pupils and teachers are learning in a civilised environment, we expect them to produce good results than before,” he said.

Dlamini also appealed to the corporate world and other well-wishers to assist in the construction of decent teachers cottages.

Hiraishi also appealed to parents to keep children in school, particularly the girls who were often made to stay at home due to various issues, among them security problems.

The Senate Thematic Committee on Millennium Development Goals on the provision of education in resettled areas recently produced a damning report about the learning environment obtaining at most satellite schools set up in former commercial farming areas.

The report established that Zimbabwe has 701 satellite primary schools that were legally registered but did not have any budgetary allocation and manpower.- The Zimbabwean

picture credit: The Zimbabwean