The Progressive Teachers Union Zimbabwe (PTUZ) has dismissed the recent announcement by Finance and Economic Development Minister Ncube on teachers’ remuneration and conditions of service as “a high sounding nothing.”
On Monday, Ncube announced a raft of measures to improve teachers’ conditions of service which include a 100% salary increase with effect from 1 July 2022.
Ncube also pledged to restore teachers’ advancements awards, provision of transport facilities to ferry teachers to work in urban and rural areas, provision of 34 000 institutional accommodation units, and the payment of school fees for up to 3 biological children per teaching family and the restoration of advancements awards.
In a statement, PTUZ president Takavafira Zhou said teachers will not accept any offer that doesn’t include the restoration of their salaries as of October 2018, pegged at US$540. Added Zhou:
Any attempt to increase the current RTGs salary component ranging from $17 000 to $27 000 by 100% is a monument of Zimbabwean injustice in light of the increase in prices of basic commodities, and susceptibility to erosion by hyperinflation, an increase of medical services, utility bills and accommodation.
Zhou said the Government’s pledge to provide institutional accommodation for teachers is “a fabrication of the worst order” and ” wishful thinking”.
He also dismissed the $20 000 offered by the government for school fees saying boarding fees are now more than $200 000 per term.
Zhou contended that the Government has no capacity to ferry teachers to workplaces adding, “at any rate, all the ZUPCO buses are not ideal for rural terrain and to assume that teachers are not aware of this is outright rubbish.”