The Sunday Mail
Gheto Whispers with Rosenthal Mutakati
A retired teacher sat on an old rickety veranda stool reading that day’s edition of the newspaper.
He had a smouldering cigarette in the ashtray and a mug of opaque beer close to his feet.
Each time he turned a new page, the gap-toothed wizened fellow would take a deep swallow of the beer, clear his throat and puff his fag before blowing the smoke into the atmosphere with buoyancy.
All this while, his equally elderly wife was performing her household chores while humming religious hymns and keeping an eye on her husband who traditionally melted into the morning crowd to spend time with his peers whenever the coast was clear.
The two lived alone at their four-roomed council-issued house in Glen Norah.
The couple’s children had started their own families though they still sent provisions here and there for their parents’ upkeep.
Grandchildren also occasionally visited.
“What is in the paper today, Matemai?” his wife, a retired nurse, asked.
The old man cleared his throat, shook his head and purred: “Someone somewhere has become mad, really mad! How can they say schoolgirls can now attend school while pregnant? It is now also a crime to give pupils corporal punishment. During our time we knew the rod was necessary to keep these children on the straight and narrow.”
“Now that these children are no longer supposed to be beaten at school, wait and see the monsters that will be bred in these schools,” the old man squealed as he helped himself to opaque beer drags in his mug.
“This is a lost generation. Vataika, kurashika chaiko,” the old man said while throwing his hands about with disdain.
But his wife did not share similar views.
She saw the move to allow pregnant girls in class as progressive.
“I think allowing pregnant girls in class brings in a measure of equality. It enables girls to attain education, unlike in the past when they were expelled and left to stew in their juices.
“Remember when these girls were chased from school the boys would not be affected. What has happened is a step in the right direction.
“On the issue of corporal punishment, I agree with the new changes. Some teachers were real monsters and some people actually pulled out of school for fear of being humiliated by some teachers through heavy beatings in front of other learners.
“We also have a good number of teachers who have in the past been brought before the courts of law for heavy-handedness in disciplining children,” the old woman argued.
Gentle reader, recent amendments to the Education Act which now allow pregnant schoolgirls in class and outlawed corporal punishment have elicited mixed views.
So topical have these issues become that it is now uncommon to board a kombi and alight without hearing people mumbling about the changes to the law.
People — the educated, dimwits, the evil-minded and the God-fearing are generally talking about these amendments.
This is a topic of the moment.
“Pregnant girls in class, it is a cocktail for disaster,” a vegetable vendor in Warren Park said.
She vowed that once someone pregnant was allowed in her daughter’s class, she would transfer her child.
“Tumwe tumitemo twemazuvano? Kakova kenyadzi kane marinda. I will never keep quiet about it,” she said,
If a scantily-dressed schoolgirl passes by, some uncouth characters jeer at her arguing: “Itai zvamada makabvumidzwa. (Do what you want. You can now dress anyhow because these things have been permitted.)”
But that is not the import of the amendments to the Education Act.
Children remain under parental guidance and they have a right to discipline them.
The law has only been amended to ensure that those few who fall pregnant are not deprived of their access to education because of pregnancy.
Most girl child support groups had for years been clamouring for the changes since girls were usually disadvantaged in circumstances where boys responsible for the pregnancies were allowed to continue with education as if nothing had happened.
Zimbabwe has declared it illegal for schools to expel pupils who get pregnant.
And women’s rights campaigners feel this will solve gender inequality in schools and stop many girls from dropping out of school. The legal amendment announced last week seeks to reinforce a 1999 guideline that was partially implemented.
It comes at a time when school closures due to coronavirus raise fears of a rise in sexual abuse and unwanted pregnancies. Many parents of pregnant girls, or the girls themselves, decide to quit schooling due to the pregnancy, and schools do not always do enough to encourage them to stay, officials note.
“I am expecting every parent and guardian and everyone else to understand that every child must be assisted by all of us to go to school,” Cde Cain Mathema, the Education Minister in charge of schools was recently quoted as saying.
“Every child whether boy or girl …has a right to go to school in Zimbabwe,” he said.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, in 2018, 12,5 percent of the country’s roughly 57 500 school dropouts stopped attending classes due to pregnancy or marriage reasons.
A huge chunk of them were girls.
Priscilla Misihairwabwi-Mushonga, who chairs a parliamentary education committee, said making the previous guidelines into law with possible sanctions would make the rules more effective and address gender disparities.
“In circumstances where the pregnancy was a result of kids of the same age, the boy would not be necessarily expelled from school,” she said.
“It was also a double tragedy for the girl . . . as in most circumstances, it was not a consensual sex but some sort of abuse by some predator older than her. So, she has been traumatised and raped then she is further traumatised by being kicked out of school.”
Gentle reader, allowing pregnant girls in class appears a bad influence to those pupils who abstain from premarital sex but it has immense benefits for the nation tomorrow.
Inotambika mughetto.
