The Sunday Mail
An “epidemic” of child sexual abuse is plaguing Zimbabwe and society is letting children down by failing to adhere to good morals, President Mugabe has said. At the opening of the 22nd Session of the Children’s Parliament and commemorations to mark the Day of the African Child in Harare yesterday, the President said weekly briefings from police contained disturbing sexual abuse statistics.
He said the current generation had failed to stop the “epidemic”.
“Chii nhai? Vakuru vedu vanenge vapindwa nemweya waSatan. Every Monday when I get briefings from the police, we have cases of children being abused from all over.
“I should have brought the statistics here to show you. Sometimes it is the father or an uncle abusing their children. Sometimes it is an elderly person or a very young girl raped by a close relative.
“It is happening and it is terrible. We don’t know what is happening. So where have our morals gone? If we are letting you down, we are saying learn from us how not to do the bad things we are doing and how to do the good we are not doing.
“Something has gone wrong. What has happened to our moral and social fibre? As Government, we are working on enhancing our policing interventions to eradicate what has turned into a epidemic,” he said.
President Mugabe said it was important to introduce skills-based education as opposed to adhering to the present “bookish” curriculum.
He said a skills-based education system was the bedrock of economic development and self-sustenance with educated young people in the driving seat of transformation.
“… the future of the nation lies in its young ones. We asked ourselves what needed to be done. ‘Education first,’ we said. Education will give them knowledge but it must also give them skills they will use to make their own live sustainable, to prosper themselves and to prosper the nation.
“Education must be our number one priority. Health? Yes sure. But if we are going to build a nation we cannot do it by theorising.”
The President added: “It is in you, you, you, our young where we have absolute faith and confidence. We cannot run away from that reckoning.
“You are our successors, the future of our country. We depend on you to pass on that entity that we call Zimbabwe to your children to build a nation with people of morals and character. That is what we are working on.”
He urged Zimbabweans to establish personal interventions such as scholarships to educate the underpriviledged.
President Mugabe said more than 20 000 Zimbabweans had gone through university via the Presidential Scholarship Programme since its inception.
At least 2 000 youths from each of the country’s 10 provinces have been educated at South African universities thanks to that initiative.
At the same event, Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Minister Francis Nhema bemoaned the school drop-out rate.
He said as many as 300 000 children drop out of school yearly.
“Your Excellency, the reality we face at the end of each academic year is that not all of our children and young people will pass their Ordinary Level examinations…
“These arise not only from failing examinations but also many are dropping out of school due to soci-economic circumstances.
“The total of those failing examinations added to those dropping out due to these circumstances is in the range of between 250 000 to 300 000.This number, Your Excellency, over a five year period, translates to between a million to a million-and-a-half. It is too ghastly to contemplate.
“This number therefore becomes the core target group of my ministry, hence our efforts in revamping the Vocational Skills Training programme. It is now our vision as a ministry that all our programmes must be geared towards vocational and entrepreneurship skills development.
“I have therefore directed the administrators of the National Youth Service Programme and the board of the Zimbabwe Youth Council to embed skills development in their programmes to add to the increased capacity for the vocational training centres.”
Child president Nhlanhla Moyo praised Government for promoting education.
“As I commend this motion to the House, may I underscore the gratitude we have as young people to our Government for the huge investment made in the education sector since independence.
“The education sector is one of the few sectors in the country in which Zimbabwe can go to the world cup and beat many other nations.”
