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Stephen Mpofu, Perspective

Rwanda is putting Zimbabwe upfront in efforts to bolster the East African country’s education sector with teachers from this country, it emerged from the Zimbabwe-Rwanda Trade and Investment Conference officially opened by President Emmerson Mnangagwa in Harare earlier this week.

A Rwandan delegation official was reported on local radio as saying that recruitment of Zimbabwean teachers was underway and that 477 educators needed will have been given the nod by the end of the second half of this year.

Rwandan Trade and Industry Minister Beata Habyanmana said when briefing journalists in Harare: “We also expect from this conference to see more Rwandan business operators coming to Zimbabwe.

We have many things to share, we have agribusiness, mining and tourism, education, financial services sector.”

Her remarks clearly echoed President Mnangagwa’s call for Rwanda and Zimbabwe and, indeed other African states, to cooperate in various socio-economic development initiatives for the betterment of our continent.

The number of teachers needed in Rwanda is probably the largest ever known to have been recruited from this country by any other African state even though education union leaders have claimed that many of their members have left the country to work for better pay abroad.

Zimbabwean teachers headed for Rwanda MUST regard themselves as not mere teachers out to help a sister African state but as this country’s ambassadors.

As such, unmitigated Zimbabwean patriots will expect that the recruitees for Rwanda will eschew wild-cat strikes to pressure their employers for better working conditions in favour of round table solutions to whatever grievance they have.

To be sure, therefore, the educators going to Rwanda as well as other Zimbabweans bound for, or already working in the diaspora – as should all other uninverted patriots here at home – must put God before self with fear of Him and with praises for His superlative goodness and our Creator will clothe each one of them with the eagle-anointing and the beneficiaries will mount the Zimbabwean flag to the sky’s limit with ever what their hands touch or what their lips utter.

The potential for exemplary behaviour by teachers recruited or other professionals recruited for work in other countries will no doubt open more doors in foreign countries for Zimbabwean workers, thereby posting this country’s proud image on the global village map.

What this discourse also suggests in the case of teachers recruited for work abroad, in the first instance, is that those educators infamous for a propensity to down tools as a way of enforcing their demands for better working conditions, are given no leeway for recruitment by friendly states.

Zimbabwe prides herself on being among African countries with the highest literacy rating.

We are talking here not about mere functional literacy related to reading or writing but about the ability to drive social and economic dispensations for national development.

Illegal economic sanctions on this country to try to remove the Zanu-PF Government from power for introducing land reform to unite our people with the land stolen from them by racist white settlers in colonial Rhodesia, have seriously decimated Zimbabwe’s economy with job losses and meagre food morsels on the dinner table for many families whose bread winners were thrown onto the streets by the economic embargo.

But thanks to what appears to be intervention from above, most members of the European Union have said they will now invest in our country, a positive move that will help bolster our Government’s engagement and re-engagement initiatives to fling open more doors for more foreign financial inflows to bolster economic growth while at the same time opening more doors abroad for academic and other Zimbabwean professionals to demonstrate the stuff of which they are made by their motherland.

Thus, as shifting international economic and social dynamics appear, the sky will sooner rather than later become the only barrier for our country socially and economically.

This obviously means that political opposition for opposition’s sake will become defunct and its proponents redundant and poverty-stricken.

A luta continua.