Today we celebrate Zimbabwe’s teachers, the builders of our future who walk into classrooms with broken chalk and still draw hope on the board. We honour the early mornings, the long walks to school, the empty lunch boxes, and the quiet strength it takes to teach when a salary cannot feed a family. Teachers keep going even when the system is cruel. But praise alone is not enough. This year’s call to recast teaching as a collaborative profession must push us from kind words to real action now. Collaboration must become our daily habit and our shield. It must protect teacher dignity and help us rebuild schools that serve children, not politics.
True collaboration, free from fear and party control, can change every lesson and every life. Teachers can build mentorship networks where experienced educators guide new graduates and share skills and care across generations. We can create shared knowledge spaces where lesson plans and simple masterclasses are stored online so rural and urban schools learn together. We can form mobile resource groups that share science tools and basic equipment so communities that have never seen a microscope can finally touch real science. We can form subject groups across schools to lift maths, science, and languages through national teamwork, not competition.
These ideas only grow in a climate of trust and unity, not spying and control. Divisive projects like Teachers for ED poison staff rooms, spread fear, and silence honest talk. They do not help learners. They reward loyalty to a party and punish independent thinking. They turn schools into political zones. Our classrooms cannot be recruitment halls. They must be safe places where every child can ask questions and every teacher can speak truth without fear. Real collaboration needs freedom and respect. It needs leaders who listen and systems that serve children, not ZANU PF politicians.
Collaboration is also political because exploitation is political. When teachers act together, they are harder to break. We must speak with one strong voice in collective bargaining for living wages, safe classrooms, and enough books, chalk, and technology. We must be ready for peaceful protests and work stoppages when leaders refuse to listen. We must build strong ties with parents, students, nurses, and all workers who want a fair country. When teachers refuse to be divided by location, age, or pressure, they become a powerful force for change.
From celebration we must move to mobilization. I invite every teacher to the ARTUZ Sports Day on 22 November in Gweru. Come to play, but also to plan. There we will prepare for bargaining, coordinate action for better working conditions, and strengthen the networks that make our profession strong. Let the sports field become our meeting hall and our promise to one another.
Our demands are simple and clear. Dissolve Teachers for ED and all partisan programmes that destroy unity, because education cannot grow in fear. Pay teachers a fair wage in line with the constitution and stop the loss of skills, because about one thousand two hundred teachers are leaving the profession every month. Write the right to collective job action and collective bargaining into the new Public Service Act so no official can silence legal solidarity or punish lawful action.
To every teacher who shows up when cupboards are empty, your courage 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, and salaries with value, not insults. Let us choose each other. Let us choose collaboration. Let us choose courage. Together we will rebuild dignity and give our children the schools they deserve. Happy Teachers’ Day. Our liberation is collective, or it is nothing.