JOHANNESBURG — On a recent schoolday morning, Florence Marembo was all dressed up with nowhere to study: The 12-year-old instead played with a dozen other students on the grounds of her school in a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital.
Her teachers at Gwinyiro Primary School said they wouldn’t work until the government pays them in foreign currency because they can’t even afford the bus fare amid the country’s economic meltdown.
But Florence, who wore a faded but neatly pressed navy blue uniform, said she would be coming to the school each day anyway because staying at home was boring.
“My parents had already paid my school fees for this term, and I think I am not going to learn anything,” she said despondently. “We spent the whole of last year without learning, and maybe this will be the same story this year again.”
The swift decline of an education system that once was the pride of the region has matched the general unraveling of Zimbabwe’s economy and infrastructure as President Robert Mugabe clings to the power he has held for 28 years.
Aid groups warn the closures also mean that hundreds of thousands of children will go hungry unless the schools open because it is the only place many children can get a proper meal.
Mugabe’s government says schools have not opened because teachers are still grading the results of examinations written last year.
Teachers, though, say they will not mark those papers because it is immoral to grade children in a year when most averaged 23 days of learning in rural schools and 48 days in urban centers instead of the usual 180 days.
“It was a blank academic year. Most children did not learn anything, but the government will not admit to the total collapse of our education system,” said Oswald Madziva, spokesman for the independent Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe.
Mugabe was a teacher before he turned to politics. When he became the first freely elected leader of Zimbabwe in 1980, he made education a priority. Within four years the number of primary school pupils had ballooned from 800,000 to more than 2.5 million and high school students from 66,000 to more than 600,000.
But the British charity Save the Children estimates only two out of 10 Zimbabwean children got to school at all last year. Many poor families are forced to send children out to find work or gather wild foods and simply cannot afford to send them to school.
Teachers can’t afford the bus fare to get to work either: The government paid them the equivalent of just $4 in December — enough to buy four loaves of bread. Teachers, like many others, are asking how they can buy goods sold in U.S. dollars if they are not paid in the currency.
Tens of thousands of teachers have left the country, while thousands of others have left the profession.
