Zimbabwe: Boarding Schools Close Early
 |
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Financial Gazette (Harare)
7 August 2008
Posted to the web 8 August 2008
Masvingo
Most boarding schools have been forced to close early to avert a hunger crisis, as the dire food shortages have not spared institutions of higher and tertiary education.
Masvingo, a drought-prone province has been hit by severe food shortages for the past five years due to poor rains and lack of farming inputs that saw the last farming season becoming 'the mother of all poor agricultural seasons' due to lack of proper government planning.
All this is despite the fact that the province boasts massive water bodies that can be harnessed for irrigation purposes.
Severe food shortages, according to students, have also impacted negatively on colleges and universities in the province such as the Great Zimbabwe University, as well as the Masvingo Technical College.
Most students from boarding schools around the province were all over town this week as most schools closed earlier than the official closing date after they ran out of mealie-meal, cooking oil as well as other basic commodities. The official closing date is today.
Notable schools that sent students home early after they completed writing their mid-year exams were the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe-run Zimuto, located a few kilometres out of Masvingo town and Pamushana Mission in Bikita
The situation was also said to be dire at other boarding schools such as the Roman Catholic-owned Mutero, Serima, and Gutu and Dewure high schools in Gutu District.
Other boarding schools advised parents pick up their children earlier as the schools are struggling to feed them.
Although the school heads remained mum on the issue, students who spoke to The Financial Gazette this week said while the authorities had struggled to feed them, the situation had gone out of control the past three weeks.
"We were just eating to survive, being fed a daily diet of cabbage and hardly ate any beef for the whole term.
"The quantity of food we were served was reduced drastically after the school authorities said they had insufficient basic commodities," said a student from Mutero High school.
The student, looking malnourished, said on better days, they had tea without bread, but on bad days, they only had watery porridge in the morning.
But acting provincial education director in the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture, Clara Taridzo Dube professed ignorance of the matter, insisting that it was illegal for schools to close earlier than the official date without notifying her office.
"I am not aware of that. As far as I am concerned, no single school has asked for permission to close early.
"We are going to launch investigations and penalise them," said Dube.
She said some schools had remained open until today. Masvingo, a province of more than 1,5 million people, is failing to feed itself amid reports that peasants in the rural areas are surviving on wild fruits as they cannot access maize meal at the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), or cannot afford the exorbitant prices charged on the parallel market for a bag of maize.
Relevant Links
A 50kg bag of maize-meal, which should be obtained from the GMB at less than $50, will not cost anything less than R200 on the informal market.
Read comments. Write your own.
|
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright © 2008 Financial Gazette. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Make allAfrica.com your home page
|
RSS Feed
Sign up for FREE daily 'top headlines' by email >> | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | My Account | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
