Critical Reflections on the Impact(s) of the So-Called ‘Teacher Incentive’ on Zimbabwe’s Public Education

For some decades, Zimbabwe’s public education has been ranked one of the best in Southern Africa, Africa and the world-over. This was chiefly a result of high quality teachers, high quality supervision of examinations adopted from its colonial master (Britain), and good working conditions for education practitioners, among other reasons. This reality, however, has turned the otherwise since the turn of the new millennium and especially in the recent years due to economic meltdown in the country and mass exodus of qualified teachers to ‘greener pastures’. Confronted with its deepening and crippling economic levels, the government of Zimbabwe has clearly indicated that it is unable to provide conducive conditions for the practitioners in public education, a situation that resulted in a series of strikes by practitioners which threatened to paralyse all the teaching-learning activities in the country. It is out of this background that the system of incentives to teachers was introduced to augment the meagre salaries earned by teachers so that public education in the country would not face liquidation or total paralysis. Yet, while the introduction of incentives in public education seems to have boosted morale of some teachers, it has deflated that of the majority of the practitioners in the profession. This paper examines the problems and/or impact of teacher incentives on education quality and stakeholders, that is, students, teachers, parents/guardians and the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture.