BURUNDI-EDUCATION: They Should Be in School

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

GATUMBA, Burundi, Oct 24 1996 (IPS) - The little girl who peeps through the bamboo walls of a classroom here as other children go through their paces in French, Burundi’s official language, is of school age.

So are the 10 other children playing hide-and-seek in front of the building, a temporary primary school for displaced children, which was set up in September by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

But they are among the more than 1,500 children who are not going to school in Gatumba, either because they have failed to secure places or because their parents are too poor to afford tuition fees and books.

The children are the casualties of the conflict in Burundi, where clashes between Hutu rebels and a Tutsi-dominated army have killed an estimated 150,000 people since late 1993 and sent tens of thousands fleeing into neighbouring countries.

Another half a million others — 70 percent of them women and children, according to UNICEF — have been displaced within Burundi. Only some of the children have been able to find schools in the communes where their families have sought refuge.

As a result, primary school enrolment has dropped by close to 40 percent. In Burundi’s high schools, the number of students has decreased by 20 percent over the past three years while teaching staff has shrunk by 40 percent, figures compiled by UNICEF show.

The children at Gatumba, a district on the border with Zaire and 25 km west of Bujumbura, are among those who displaced by the conflict. Their families fled from communes on the outskirts of Bujumbura, after they were rendered unsafe by soldiers bent on wiping out armed Hutus there.

Three years ago, Gatumba’s population was only 7,000. “Now we have over 130,000 people, most of them displaced persons,” said Mary Theresa Nkurunziza, the district’s top civilian administrator.

It’s not only the children who are affected. The situation of teachers is little better, says Scholastique Ntahorwamiyi. When fighting broke out in Kamenge, the Hutu suburb of Bujumbura where she lived, she, her husband and their four children fled, leaving almost all their property behind. As with all officials who desert their posts — whether they are displaced by the conflict or not — this meant that she automatically forfeited her salary.

She was luckier than many. Along with other displaced teachers, she was taken on at the Gatumba III primary school, which is supported by UNICEF. “I had almost lost hope of getting another job until this project came along,” Ntahorwamiyi, who is the school’s headteacher, told IPS.

The UN agency provided the plastic sheeting that covers the 12 classrooms of her school as well as books for the pupils.

Already disrupted by the conflict, Burundi’s education system suffered another blow when its neighbours imposed a blockade to force retired major Pierre Buyoya to step down. Buyoya, who was de facto president until 1993, when he lost the country’s first multiparty elections, returned to power in a Jul. 25 military coup.

The embargo, imposed on Jul. 31 by Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Zambia and Zaire, has hit Burundi hard, with drugs, food and school supplies becoming increasingly scarce.

“Some 600 metric tonnes of rice and 140 metric tonnes of sugar are blocked in Tanzania,” said Jean-Luc Siblot, World Food Programme (WFP) resident representative in Burundi. “They are urgently needed for schools, otherwise some schools will not open this month (October).”

In addition, 350 tonnes of urgently needed school materials — mostly textbooks, pens, pencils and laboratory equipment — which France had promised to deliver free of charge, are yet to arrive. The supplies were collected by Burundi’s Princess Esther Kamatari, a former model in Paris, with the help of Burundian drummers who performed in France early this year.

To rectify the situation, UNICEF is funding a temporary-school programme, where teachers are provided with ready-made kits to conduct classes wherever schools have been destroyed and there are displaced and needy children.

UNICEF’s Elizabeth Kramer told IPS. “We are planning to build another school here (in Gatumba). There are many children who haven’t been to school. This is a chance for them to start school.”

“People here are willing to give us a piece of land for building classrooms provided that we don’t take the land from them for good,” said Nkurunziza, who recently surveyed land just across the road from the Gatumba III school, accompanied by ACED and UNICEF officials.

UNICEF is also supporting a local non-governmental organisation, l’Association Pour L’Education, and the ministry of education, which will soon start building 18 temporary classrooms in the Bujumbura commune of Buyezi, whose children, like so many others in the Central African nation, have witnessed killings, rape and destruction of property.

“The children have been traumatised by what they have seen in war. This type of school can help them to overcome what they have seen,” said Kramer.