Opinion: Township Schools Are Carrying This City. Let’s Say So Out Loud.

Take a quiet look at the names on this year’s Cambridge A-Level top performers list for Matabeleland. The patterns have shifted. The biggest cluster of distinctions is not coming from the historically elite suburban schools. It is coming from township schools — Sobukhazi, Mzilikazi High, Mpopoma — that operate on a fraction of the resources.

This deserves to be said out loud. The teachers at these schools, often paid late and working with shared textbooks, are quietly running one of the most effective educational improvement stories in the country.

We should resist the urge to romanticise this. Underfunding is not a virtue. Many of these teachers are exhausted. But it is past time the city, and the country, named what is happening.

If we want a roadmap for fixing education, the people who already cracked it on a budget are sitting in Bulawayo’s township staff rooms.