At the recently held University of Zimbabwe 44th graduation ceremony, Professor Paul Mapfumo stood before graduates, dignitaries, and the President. He insisted that his “transformation agenda” would not be derailed by those he claims are launching sustained attacks on him and his administration. It was a dramatic line for a graduation ceremony, but also a misplaced one. For no one is plotting against him. No shadowy network is out to topple the Vice Chancellor. What there is, is poverty, hunger, and a community of lecturers asking for nothing more radical than to be paid enough to live like professionals instead of beggars.
To misread that reality as sabotage is to confuse the hunger pangs of your own staff with the whispers of imagined enemies. And to label those demands “retrogressive” is to drain that word of all meaning. Retrogression is not the act of demanding a living wage. Retrogression is allowing a university once held in high regard to slide into disrepair because the people who make it function can no longer afford to stay.
The strike by members of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) is not a political game. It is a four-month cry for survival in a country where inflation has chewed through paychecks and dignity alike. The lecturers are currently paid about US$230 a month. That amount cannot stretch to cover rent, transport, food, health care, or school fees.
They are asking for the restoration of their pre-2018 levels, about US$2,250. That is not greed, but the difference between standing in front of a lecture hall with focus and authority. Or standing there half-present, distracted by debts and bills.
When someone as influential as Professor Mapfumo frames these demands as an attack, he deflects attention from the true source of the crisis. It is easier to imagine enemies than to confront poverty. It is easier to accuse striking staff of sabotage than to admit that an institution paying its core workforce less than a living wage is on borrowed time. But none of this is new. It is no secret that Zimbabwe’s education system has been hollowed out by economic collapse. The rot is visible not only in universities but in primary and secondary schools, where teachers often survive through side hassles and moonlighting in ways that chip away at the very mission of education.
Justice must begins with recognizing dignity. And dignity is not a handout or a slogan in a speech, it is a wage that allows someone to sustain themselves without perpetual humiliation. To underpay lecturers while demanding excellence is to ask them to turn water into wine, to insist that intellectual labor can be conjured from thin air. It is a kind of institutional violence: the slow grinding down of professionals until they are reduced to shells of what they were trained to be. That is what is retrogressive.
It is not just the lecturers who suffer. It is the students who sit in classes taught by exhausted staff who must rush away to private tutoring jobs just to survive. It is the postgraduate candidates whose dissertations remain unsupervised because the person meant to guide them is on strike, or has left for greener pastures. It is the graduates capped in ceremonies where the pomp and circumstance mask the uneasy truth that the quality of their degrees is increasingly questioned, both locally and abroad. When education becomes fragile, society becomes fragile with it. And the cost is borne not by administrators but by ordinary families whose children’s futures depend on those degrees.
A university is not built by vice-chancellors alone. It is built by the daily, often invisible labor of those who teach, supervise, research, grade, and mentor. To dismiss their strike as “retrogressive” is to ignore the moral weight of their demands. They are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for justice in the most basic sense: fair pay for fair work. And when justice is delayed, institutions unravel. Standards slip. And the next generation pays the price.
Graduation went ahead this year under a cloud of controversy. The gowns were worn, the degrees capped, the speeches delivered. But the cloud remains, because a ceremony cannot erase the unresolved crisis beneath it. Every graduate who walked across that stage walked with a question mark attached to their degree: who taught them, who supervised their work, who marked their papers? And if the answer is “underpaid lecturers who were striking for months,” then the university must reckon with the consequences of prioritizing ceremonies over solutions.
The Vice Chancellor’s insistence on defending himself from attacks is revealing. It suggests that he views himself as the embattled figure in this crisis. But leadership is not about centering yourself. It is about centering the institution, and more importantly, the people who give it life. The lecturers are not enemies. They are the foundation. To confuse them with adversaries is to mistake the scaffolding for a threat when in reality it is the only thing holding the house up.
Social justice requires shifting the gaze. Instead of asking how the Vice Chancellor feels about supposed attacks, we should be asking how lecturers are feeding their families, how students are completing their degrees, how the quality of education is being preserved. Justice is not comfortable. It is disruptive. But disruption in the name of survival is not retrogressive. It is the most natural, human response to being devalued.
Professor Mapfumo may believe his transformation agenda is under siege, but the real siege is being waged against the very idea of higher education as a public good. Every time a lecturer leaves the profession because they cannot make rent, every time a student receives compromised teaching because their supervisor is overstretched, every time a graduation is rushed through while the foundations crumble. That is the true attack on the university. And it comes not from staff but from the structures that keep them impoverished.
It is poverty, Professor, not a plot. Poverty that eats away at salaries. Poverty that drives standards down. Poverty that turns education into a fragile promise instead of a solid guarantee. And until that is confronted directly, not sidestepped with talk of retrogression or imagined conspiracies — the University of Zimbabwe will continue to slide, no matter how many speeches are made at graduation.
Lecturers are not saboteurs. They are the keepers of knowledge, the transmitters of culture, the mentors of the young. Treating them with suspicion instead of respect will not restore the university’s standing. Paying them fairly, valuing their work, and recognizing their dignity will. Anything else is noise.
So let us be clear: no one is out to get the Vice Chancellor. No one is out to derail his agenda. What the lecturers want is simple and just: a living wage. And the longer that truth is ignored, the deeper the shadow over every degree, every student, every ceremony.
Latest Articles
- Trevor Ncube Has Discovered That Free Speech Is More Complicated When You’re the BossTrevor Ncube has built his public standing on the case for a free press. Last month his own publishing company is reported by ZimLive to have gone to the High Court against 36 of its employees. ZimInd Publishers, which publishes NewsDay, The Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent, is claiming US$100,000 over statements it says were defamatory, in a summons dated September 25, ZimLive reports. The …
- Gweru Has a Sewer Problem. Naturally, the Residents Are on Trial.On 9 October The Herald reported that Gweru City Council is battling sewer blockages it blames on residents flushing plastic bags, nappies, sanitary products and rags, with sewage spilling into homes and streets in Mkoba, Mtapa, Senga and Ascot. The council has the contents of its pipes right. Mayor Martin Chivhoko told councillors that crews had responded to more than 300 blockages in a single …
- Zimbabwean Government, A Forecast Is Not a Disaster PlanHurricane Isaias came ashore near Destin, Florida, United States, on Friday night last week as a Category 2 storm. Its winds were 105 mph at landfall. By early Saturday, more than 726,000 customers in Florida and Alabama had lost power, and some Panhandle counties had briefly suspended emergency response because conditions were too dangerous. Everyone saw this coming. Forecasters had warned of storm surge of …
- The Next Battlefield May Be the Data Centre Down the RoadIn the early hours of 8 October a drone set fire to a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, a town in Russia’s Ryazan region. Yandex told AFP that the facility had stopped operating entirely. The outage reached Yandex Cloud and the products built on it, such as Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents, and Yandex shares fell more than 3 percent on the Moscow Exchange. The …
- Cheap Fuel Is Expensive If It Comes With a Geopolitical BillWashington has eased sanctions on Russian diesel, but has not said what it got in return. Diesel is expensive, American voters are noticing, and Vladimir Putin says he can help. On October 9, after a phone call with the Russian president, Donald Trump announced that Russia would supply diesel to American and global markets, more than 300,000 tonnes immediately and more in the months ahead. …
