TEACHERS ARE THE HEARTBEAT OF CHANGE, NOT THE MOUTHPIECES OF POWER

Today we celebrate Zimbabwe’s teachers, the architects of our future who hold broken chalk and still draw hope on the board. I honour the early mornings, the long walks, the empty lunch boxes, and the quiet courage it takes to teach when pay cannot feed a family. But praise is not enough. This year’s theme, “Recasting teaching as a collaborative profession,” calls us to move from gratitude to action now. Collaboration must be our habit and our shield. It must protect teacher dignity and build the schools our children deserve.

True collaboration, free from fear and party control, can change every lesson and every life. We can create mentorship networks where seasoned teachers guide new graduates and share craft and care across generations. We can build shared expertise hubs where lesson plans and simple masterclasses live online so urban and rural schools learn together. We can launch mobile resource brigades that pool labs and equipment to bring real science to communities that have never seen a microscope. We can form cross-school subject associations to lift maths, science, and languages with national teamwork.

These ideas only grow in an atmosphere of trust and unity, not surveillance. Divisive projects like Teachers for ED poison staff rooms, spread fear, and silence honest debate. They do not lift learners. They reward loyalty to a party and punish independence. They turn schools into political zones. Our classrooms cannot be recruitment halls. They must be safe spaces where every child may ask a question and every teacher may speak truth without fear. Collaboration needs freedom and respect. It needs leaders who listen and systems that serve children, not politicians.

Collaboration is also political because exploitation is political. When we act together we are not easy to break. We must speak with one voice in collective bargaining for living wages, safe rooms, and enough books, chalk, and technology. We must be ready for strategic job actions, including peaceful protests and work stoppages, when leaders refuse to listen. We must build alliances with parents, students, nurses, and all workers who want a fair country. When teachers refuse to be divided by geography, experience, or pressure, we become an unstoppable force for change.

From celebration we move to mobilization. I invite every teacher to the ARTUZ Sports Day on 22 November in Gweru. Come to play, but to plan. There we will prepare for bargaining, coordinate actions for better working conditions, and strengthen the networks that make our profession unbreakable. Let the field be our meeting hall and our promise to one another.

Our demands are clear. Dissolve Teachers for ED and all partisan programmes that break our unity, because education cannot grow in a garden of fear. Pay teachers a fair wage in line with the constitution and stop the loss of talent, because about one thousand two hundred teachers are leaving the profession every month. Write the rights to collective job action and collective bargaining into the coming Public Service Act so no official can silence legal solidarity or punish lawful collaboration.

To every teacher who shows up when the cupboard is bare, your passion lights the future. You are not alone. We stand with you against ZANU PF rule that has turned schools into billboards and professionals into beggars. We stand for classrooms full of books, not slogans; labs with equipment, not promises; salaries with value, not insults. Let us choose each other. Let us choose collaboration. Let us choose courage. Together we will rebuild dignity and deliver the schools our children deserve. Happy Teachers’ Day. Our liberation is collective, or it is nothing.

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