HomeOld_PostsLanguage as a pre-regime change agenda: Part Five …educational betrayal in Matabeleland

Language as a pre-regime change agenda: Part Five …educational betrayal in Matabeleland

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IN the last installments, I dealt with issues on how former colonial masters were using people in the Matabeleland region to turn against their Shona brothers from other regions mainly Mashonaland.
The reasons cited are marginalisation and the loss of job opportunities to those people from other regions.
It should be noted that it is the same detractors who last year sparked a fierce debate on non-Ndebele speaking teachers working with Ndebele speaking children.
The sponsored tribal groups toured schools mainly in rural Matabeleland, victimising Shona-speaking teachers and asking them to pack up and go.
Fortunately this debate was doused not by the detractors who started it, but by the statistics which showed that the same former colonialists were working against the interests of Ndebele-speaking children by urging them to boycott school and travel to South Africa and form rebel groups to work against Government programmes in the region.
Sponsored tribal groupings piled pressure in Matabeleland South, and the results today are that 15 primary schools in the affected area recorded zero percent pass rate in the 2014 Grade Seven public examinations down from 13 percent the previous year.
While failure rate cannot be completely attributed to the tribal tensions, it should be noted that the region is facing a national educational dilemma.
Every year students at the higher institutes of learning, tribal remarks are made to the effect that more students from other regions were benefitting at the expense of those from Matabeleland.
While this went on, politicians, academics and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who chorused on the tribal slurs against Shona teachers are nowhere to be seen and are dissociating themselves from this fiasco.
Children in Matabeleland South and North provinces are the hardest hit by this well orchestrated soft power regime change agenda.
They were told the Government does not want them to get jobs and has shut down industries in the region so they should trek to South Africa.
Ironically, these children who are coerced to go to South Africa are forced to work in slave conditions in sugar plantations, potato and orange farms in the Limpopo province of South Africa.
This is the same province that is highly populated by former white commercial farmers whose land was repossessed by the Government under the successful land resettlement programme.
The children of Matabeleland have nevertheless not found life easy in the ‘City of Gold’ as promised.
Instead many are turned into beggars, drug mules, sex workers and refugees.
The same colonialists who oppressed Zimbabweans are taking advantage of them in South Africa.
In a bid to try and cover their dirty tracks, some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working with these former white farmers have set up chicken rearing, nutritional gardens and other clandestine projects for communities in Zimbabwe where they have ‘harvested’ slave labour.
This is meant to buy the silence of parents and other community leaders, as evidenced by the stone silence over this issue.
This is contrary to the Government policy of ensuring access to education and health services for all its citizens without any hassles.
Colonialists came up with a counter measure to make sure this policy did not work in Matabeleland.
Non-governmental organisations have held workshops for teachers in rural Matabeleland where they are paid to tell children of Matabeleland that they don’t belong to Zimbabwe, their homeland is Zululand in South Africa.
A shaken former cross-border jumper confessed that they are treated like dirt in a country they were made to believe is their ‘ancestral home’, they said other nationals and tribes are treated better than those who go there as ‘Ndebele’.
Due to frustration and hopelessness most turn to gun-totting and knife culture.
“Somebody has not told us the truth, I think we need to know the truth,” demanded Dumisani Sibanda who worked in South Africa as a farm hand for seven years.
To try and bring out the real truth to the children of Matabeleland, there is one revolutionary who deserves the support of all educational stakeholders in the region.
He is a former diplomat who has worked in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in countries Zimbabwean children are rushing to in search of a better life.
He is Zimbabwe’s second Vice-President, Cde Phelekezela Mphoko.
Last week, he told school children at Mahlothova Secondary School in Nyamandlovu where he donated books that they should concentrate on their studies.
He pulled a shocker and told them not to illegally cross to South Africa as there was nothing for them there.
“Home will always be home,” he said.
“Don’t think home is elsewhere.
“Don’t think there is life for you across.
“Concentrate on your education and not crossing to South Africa.”
VP Mphoko urged them to cash in on opportunities in the country after acquiring education.
He had with him gruesome pictures depicting how terrible life is for Zimbabweans in South Africa and showed the children pictures of people attacked in xenophobic attacks and one, a foreigner probably Zimbabwean who was burnt by putting a tyre around his neck and set alight.
VP Mphoko had another picture of people who help others cross the border illegally carrying a baby after the mother had fled the police while illegally crossing Limpopo River into South Africa.
He said obviously the baby was thrown in the water after the mother fled.
Cde Mphoko said a lot of money was paid to cross-border transporters by desperate children who want to illegally cross and settle in South Africa oblivious of the danger they expose themselves to when they reach that country.
He said girls are detained by the transporters and sold to sexual perverts who abuse them so that transporters recoup their money, while boys on the other hand would be hired to homosexuals.
“There is no better place than home,” he said.
“Don’t rush to South Africa.”
The VP’s sentiments came following the recent death of 12 Zimbabweans from Tsholotsho District who were involved in an accident in Botswana on their way to South Africa.
Their driver was rushing them to the South African border so they could cross illegally before dark as they had no travel documents.
VP Mphoko is the first politician in Matabeleland to see evil where others did not see it.
As a torch bearer, his efforts should be supported by the region to demystify the myth that South Africa offers a better life for our children.

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