Exporting teachers is a national scandal

The recent call by Rwanda president Paul Kagame, inviting Zimbabwean teachers to go and work in his country sparked a lot of interest and provoked debate among Zimbabweans on the circumstances surrounding the invite and the likely response.

Zimbabwe churns out high quality teachers and nurses every year but the majority of these professionals end up sitting at home, joining legions of unemployed young Zimbabweans, because the government says it has no money to employ them.

The result has been that Zimbabwe loses hundreds of trained teachers and nurses to foreign countries after spending a fortune in training them.

Meanwhile, our hospitals and clinics have critical shortages of nurses while the teacher-pupil ratio in schools continues to grow. This is happening even when the obtaining Covid-19 pandemic demands significant reduction in the size of classes, the most likely reason why wise leaders are looking for more teachers from outside their borders.

Instead of opening their eyes and realising the folly of their undiscerning minds, our government appears to be impervious to common sense. They appear to love the skills exodus; gleefully embracing it as a solution to the unemployment problem on their hands.

Something is very wrong with the thinking of the people that govern this country.

Our law-makers too, the men and women that we vote for and entrust with the responsibility to represent our interests in Parliament, must be sleeping in the House half the time or are outright dumb.

Our ministers sit in Cabinet in weekly meetings, chaired and steered by the president, and they correctly acknowledge the critical shortage of teachers and nurses in Zimbabwe.

They agree too that there is need to continue training the teachers and nurses — to even increase output from the country’s nursing schools and teachers’ colleges. But in the same meetings, they also debate and agree not to employ those teachers and nurses because, they say, the country does not have the money to pay them!

So, the unemployed teachers and nurses do the logical thing. They go where they are wanted and where they are paid decent wages. The government then responds by boasting loudly that they produce high quality teachers and sought-after nurses.

In 2013, the government actually mooted the idea of officially exporting nurses to “needy” neighbours in the region and elsewhere. What a national fraud!

Cabinet also acknowledges quite happily that the country is training — non-stop — police and soldiers; it does not matter that Zimbabwe is not at war. All of them are given jobs immediately after six-months training, on the same salaries as nurses. It takes three years and more to train teachers and nurses.

We would, in a normal country, expect a lot of noise in Cabinet and in parliament too, over this clear affront to the people of Zimbabwe. We would expect even resignations by the health and education ministers. But no, we are in Zimbabwe where departure from public office has to be forced.