A day at Chester House

Garikai Dzoma Avatar
When it comes to technology, the folks at Chester house are just as clueless and flustered as this dinosaur.
When it comes to technology, the folks at Chester house are just as clueless and flustered as this dinosaur.

It is truth generally accepted that Harare is the most technologically advanced city in the country with access to all the new and latest shiny toys that technology has to offer. True, when one is a resident of Harare there is a buffet of technologies to choose from that are usually not to be found in the more remote areas. The many different last mile broadband solutions from fibre to WiMax when most areas can only do with VSAT, a fairly sane load shedding schedule when the rest of the country is switched off as a matter of routine are among the perks of living in the capital. It would seem however, based on my recent visit to the Provincial Education offices, that these joys have for some explicable reason eluded Chester house.

Being the Education head office of a Province that we expect to be the most affluent and endowed I would have expected them to not only have top notch technology gadgets in their offices but for them to take advantage nascent concepts like Social Media which the school going youth in the Capital have fully embraced and now seem to rely on for everything. A look at the Ministry of Education Facebook page will show you that not only is the page not frequently updated and has a pathetic 942 likes (compared to the 173 856 candidates who wrote their O level exams); the few existing posts from parents and students have gone largely ignored.

The lifts in the building have not been working for months and it doesn’t seem like they are going to be repaired soon so parents and staff, including those with bulky frames, have to hurl themselves up and down the stairs. Most of the offices are not equipped with computers or the ones they have are either seriously outdated, with most running the now unsupported Windows XP from over a decade ago, whilst others are simply dead. I quickly learnt that the printers in the few offices that have them are for show since most of the printing is outsourced to a guy with a printing business who rents out the first floor.

The computers in the building do not appear to have never been networked and my host told me that their emails “are not working at the moment” although I suspect they either have not been working for a while or they never worked in the first place. When I asked him if they had WiFi he blinked at me in confusion; I might well have spoken Greek to him.

To process our document we had to work the stairs down to the first floor to meet the “printing guy” who handles most of the ministry’s confidential documents although he is a civilian and takes his laptop home every night. When asked to proof read and effect changes to the two page document, our host looked out of his depth performing the basic tasks of copying and pasting. He also appeared out of touch with the QWERTY keyboard, resorting to poking each key in turn as if the whole keyboard were some monster in a cage and subsequently spent the better part of an hour wrestling with the task.

As it turned out after the circuit breaker for the building’s switches tripped, “printing guy’s” laptop battery was not working, so the computer immediately turned off so we ended up losing all the unsaved work and had to go through the torture scenes of seeing our host perform ballet with the computer. I had this suspicious feeling within me that the documents on the laptop are not backed up anywhere else and I began to wonder what if disaster were to strike as it is wont to do, should an important provincial office putting itself in such as precarious position? Finally as these thoughts went through my mind the host completed his fencing, printed the error free document, stamped it ( because that is so important) and handed it over to us.

As we left the Chester House and its sad state of affairs I couldn’t help but recall the words of Jesus: For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry? If this is what is happening to the best office in the country, what about the others?

Picture from Best Pics.

4 comments

  1. tinm@n

    How shallow.

    There are reasons why that is the state of affairs. It takes money to get good human and infrastructural resources. You cannot expect good quality where the best would not want to be employed.

    Its burying your head in the sand and it is ignorance or pretence to it that gives you such an arrogant worldview.

    I can bet you no one there really desires that situation and have had to accept it.

    I can bet you the leadership would rather have good facilities run by the best professionals but cannot afford them both

    1. Garikai Dzoma

      Are you for real?! I bet the clowns at NSSA are giving the same arguement to cover for their incompetence after paying $4.5 million for computer equipment that was never delivered. This isn’t about funding this about graft and lack of care.

      I am a stakeholder in the education sector and I do not for a minute buy the excuse that this is simply a case of lack of funding. If you don’t believe me just visit Chester House the state of affairs there is unacceptable and the Education sector is at real risk here.

    2. Batman

      Besides the resources and all that u are talking about; i don’t expect a government office to outsource printing

  2. L.S.M. Kabweza

    He also appeared out of touch with the QWERTY keyboard, resorting to poking each key in turn as if the whole keyboard were some monster in a cage

    dude, hilarious!

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