The panic and despondency that gripped Zimbabwe when Unicef announced that it was withdrawing its support for the Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM), a programme which provides educational assistance to 400 000 orphans and under-privileged children, should instruct us to fully take the responsibility of educating our children rather reposing it to foreigners, who sometimes due to the caprices of politics could not be reliable or trustworthy.
Even though our fears were subsequently allayed when it was announced that Unicef was merely pulling out its intercessional role with the donors remaining, it is still worrying that as a nation we are leaving foreigners to educate such a staggering number of our impressionable children. With the timely support of the British

Department for International Development (DFID) through Crown agents, we can for now shelve our fears of who will sponsor our children’s education. But it should not escape our minds that the British educational support is only available for one year though it is open for renewal.
Not so long ago, Unicef funded the supply of 13 million primary school textbooks which were distributed to all primary schools in the country. Apparently, we granted our benefactors the leeway to supply textbooks whose content and orientation we did not originate or control. The uncertainty recently created by the imagined withdrawal of BEAM donors together with the uncertainty inherent in the limited tenure of the current educational support, should palpably worry us as parents. This should further be compounded by national security concerns congenital in the fact that textbooks whose origination is alien are currently in use in our primary schools.

Arguably, this form of assistance, which usually has some political strings attached to it, cannot be relied upon and should not be trusted. It does not empower us in any way but openly leaves us breathlessly begging for more from benefactors whose political hue could leave our sovereignty and revolutionary doctrine porous. History has taught us that education is an essential social service which can be hijacked by subversive elements to misinform our people about where we are coming from to where we are going. It was not a coincidence that all history textbooks after independence were written through the eyes of the white minority and generously gave a blind eye to the struggles of the black majority.

Commendably, our government was on track immediately after independence when it provided free education to all children countrywide. We were only infiltrated and duped by neo-liberal forces, under the illusion of economic reforms (ESAP), to privatise all social services including education, leaving most parents futilely struggling to pay for their children’s education due to its prohibitive costs. The gap of funding education left by government was cunningly filled by aid organisations most of whom had an imperial agenda to weaken the bond between the government and its people so as to safeguard their neo-liberal interests in the country.

We understand that we are presently incapable of fully supporting the educational needs of our children due to constraints spawned by the illegal sanctions, but that should not stop us from setting up facilities that would in the future allow us to self fund the educational needs of our children.
It is commendable that since 2000, the BEAM programme was fully funded from government coffers and that the sanctions burdened government still supports 150 000 secondary school pupils through the same programme.

If other African countries like Libya under Muamar Gadaffi were able to singularly fund the education of all their children to tertiary level on the strength of their natural resources, why cannot we model our systems along the same lines and ensure that part of earnings from our abundant mineral resources are committed to educating our children. In the same vein, recently created Community Ownership Trusts could channel some of their money towards educating children in their communities.

• Tendai Moyo is a researcher and social commentator.