I saw a boy the other day right in the middle of the city centre just sitting by the pavement and wondered what the heck he was doing there when he was obviously supposed to be in class. You see the young lad was wearing a school uniform and I paused and asked him what his story was. He told me he was a grade four pupil in one of what was once Bulawayo’s elite schools. “I was told to go home.” “Why,” I asked. “I have not paid school fees,” he told me. Obviously it brought me back to the gulf that glaringly exists between policymakers and policy implementers in this country especially after the coming of the GNU. Where do we situate a grade four pupil who is loitering in the city centre because his parents are broke and pronouncements by the Minister Education that every child has a right to education and therefore must not be expelled because the parents are poor? Of course there is nothing new in this enquiry, but the fact that these pupils seen in the city centre are usually dismissed by many strangers as  playing truant, it does provide a disturbing trend when one thinks that next time you see child in uniform right in the CBD, it is not because they decided to bunk, skip classes, but it could be because they have been told they have no place among paying students, yet it is already known that parents are failing to pay for everything including feeding their children. When is it all going to end so that these so-called future leaders in Zimbabwe are made to inherit the wind? Who needs daft future leaders when we already have our plateful?

This entry was posted on February 14th, 2011 at 2:07 pm by Marko Phiri and is filed under Governance, Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.