by David Martin in Johannesburg – SANF 04 no 104
A few days ago in the upmarket Sandton shopping centre in Johannesburg a friend was confronted by a supposed Zimbabwean “beggar” who bemoaned in fluent English the lack of job opportunities at home and stressed the pressing needs of his “family” in South Africa.
My friend replied to the “beggar” in Shona, the main vernacular language of Zimbabwe. The “beggar”, resplendent in a mock but nevertheless expensive Italian Gucci T-shirt, was startled by the reply in his home language by a black woman whom he had presumed to be a South African.
Instead of bemoaning the state of things at home, my friend said, perhaps he should be counting his blessings that he came from Zimbabwe where most of his three million plus countrymen and women living overseas are gainfully employed.
An estimated two million of these live in South Africa where, according to Refugees International, only 5,000 have ever applied for refugee status. That is 0.0025 percent of Zimbabweans living in South Africa and an even smaller number — 20 applicants totalling 0.00001 percent — have been granted political asylum.
Sensing the “beggar’s” mounting discomfort at being confronted by such a point of view, my friend gave him Rand 30 (about US$5). I thought this was an act of extreme generosity on her part for many less-informed people in South Africa would have believed the “beggar’s” story.
A few days later at my friend’s house, the domestic worker drew my attention to the reality of the meeting with the “beggar”.
The worker is a Zimbabwean. His closest friend, the gardener, is also a Zimbabwean. Most of the domestic workers on the street where my host lives are Zimbabweans.
The explanation for this reality is simple: nearly 90 percent of Zimbabweans can read and write. Zimbabwe has the highest literacy rate on the African continent. However, according to the Ministry of Education in Pretoria (but inexplicably not mentioned in the 2003 UN Human Development Report on South Africa), almost 30 percent of South Africans are illiterate.
The Ministry persists in using the figure of 85.9 percent literate. But this is based on a 1996 census that presumably includes apartheid era statistics and is regarded as highly unreliable within the Ministry. Moreover, literacy or illiteracy rate figures do not formally exist in South Africa.
More reliable, senior officials note, is the fact that some 30 million 15-to-50-years-olds live in South Africa. Almost seven million of these are classified as functionally illiterate by the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), not having completed four years of formal primary schooling.
According to an equivalent UNDP-sponsored report on Zimbabwe: “By the mid-1990s, Zimbabwe had achieved near universal primary education for all.
“In 1994, the net enrolment ratio was 81.9 percent, improving to 93 percent in 2002. Consequently, literacy rates for 15-24 year olds rose from 95 to 98 percent between 1992 and 1999.”
It also means that Zimbabwe is close to achieving two of the eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): Ensuring that, by 2015, all girls and boys will be able to complete primary school; and, Eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and at all levels of education no later than 2015.
This factor alone makes Zimbabweans more desirable in semi-educated and educated employment, than others in the region where none of the countries approaches the literacy rate of Zimbabwe.
This literacy also has another dimension, according to the British Embassy in Harare, as Zimbabweans living in the United Kingdom remit some GBP2 million monthly to their home country.
Only the number of Zimbabweans in UK is in dispute, some 100,000 according to official British figures. But the true figure is probably nearer one million.
Two whole English towns have been resettled, with Shona becoming the dominant language, while London is referred to in Zimbabwe these days as “Harare north”.
Many of the Zimbabweans living in UK are nurses and teachers, educated and then “poached” from post-independence Zimbabwe.
After independence in April 1980, the government of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe decided to concentrate on education and health, the British through their imposed constitution having denied him the possibility of immediately addressing Zimbabweans’ main grievance, the land.
The number of schools (both primary and secondary) and medical clinics mushroomed to impressive proportions in the first years after independence while the bemused former rulers looked on, their complaints about shortages such as books and trained teachers in the facilities more a comment on their past failings rather than contemporary reality.
Many of those living outside the country like the “beggar”, are recipients of Mugabe’s post-independence education and health policies as are many who have joined the ranks of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
By and large, those who have joined the MDC have also benefited from post-independence Zimbabwe in a second way: through the affirmative action programmes that have promoted blacks.
If an explanation is needed as to why Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) are still in power, one needs to look no further.
Elephants, they say, have long memories; but sometimes those of the people are even longer (SARDC)
