Invest in our children, says Zuma
President Jacob Zuma read fellow leaders a lesson before heading out with them to Sunday’s World Cup final.
Just hours before the Dutch-Spanish final, Zuma convened leaders from Burkina Faso, Kenya, Togo, Mozambique, the Netherlands and neighbouring Zimbabwe at an education summit in Pretoria.
At the meeting, he urged African leaders to ensure parents don’t have to pay school fees or buy uniforms - costs that can keep children out of school. He also called on leaders from developed countries to honour pledges to support education in poor countries.
“We convened this summit because of our strongly held view that the first soccer World Cup tournament on African soil should have a lasting legacy,” Zuma said at the meeting, which was also attended by United Nations and international sporting officials.
“The most important investment in the future of any nation is in education,” Zuma said. “No legacy could be higher than that.”
The summit is the culmination of 1GOAL, a campaign supported by football’s governing body Fifa to use the attention the World Cup commands to publicise the need to get more children into school. An estimated 72 million children aren’t in school and millions more do not have access to quality education, according to 1GOAL.
1GOAL has brought in luminaries from sports, entertainment and politics to push the campaign - Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, Colombian pop star Shakira, Hillary Clinton and others.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was among those at the summit. Post-independence Zimbabwe’s education was once widely praised, preparing graduates for high-level jobs across southern Africa and in the West. But with the nation’s economic collapse blamed on Mugabe’s policies and its international isolation because of his poor human rights records, young Zimbabweans are dropping out of school and leaving the country to work or beg.
Zuma’s administration had been criticised for inviting Mugabe for the World Cup final and summit. Last week, Ayanda Ntsaluba, a top foreign ministry official, told reporters asking Mugabe was “a normal invitation extended to a sitting president of a neighbouring country”.
While Mugabe did not address the summit, Nthabiseng Tshabalala, a 12-year-old in her blue-and-white Soweto school uniform, did.
“I wish all children could go to school like I do,” she said.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said the international financial crisis could not be an excuse. “Destroying education and health systems by cutting budgets is not the way to achieve sound economic recovery,” he said.
Ensuring all the world’s children have a chance to finish at least primary school is one of eight goals set at a UN conference in 2000.
Source: IOL
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