By Wilfred Arinda Nshekantebirwe
There is nothing more beautiful than a teacher waking up with pride, walking into the classroom with a smile and hope. It is the image of true patriotism, a man or woman who carries in their hands the chalk that writes the destiny of an entire people, who holds in their voice the power to awaken hidden potential in young minds, and who daily performs the quiet miracle of transforming ignorance into knowledge.
A motivated teacher walks into school like a gardener tending a garden, watering the fragile seedlings of tomorrow with patience, nurturing them with care, pruning away doubt, and feeding them with wisdom. Such a teacher teaches not only formulas and grammar, but courage, discipline, respect, and vision. In the presence of such a teacher, a classroom becomes a fountain of hope, a temple of dreams, a workshop where the future is crafted piece by piece.
No teacher, at the beginning of their journey, ever dreams of mediocrity. No teacher chooses this calling with the intention of producing half-baked children or an entire class of failures. No teacher wakes up in the morning thinking of dodging duty, or of standing before their students with despair written on their faces. Every true teacher longs for excellence, longs to see their pupils succeed, longs to be remembered as the bridge that carried a generation to greatness.
And then frustration comes. Slowly, steadily, cruelly. The same teacher who longed to serve with joy is stripped of dignity by a system that demands everything but offers nothing. The same teacher who desired to give their best is crushed by a government that treats their profession as a burden, not a blessing. Pride withers when the pockets remain empty, when the landlord knocks, when the children at home cry for school fees, when the nation looks the other way. It is not in the heart of a teacher to produce failure, failure is imposed upon them. It is not laziness that leads to ungraded classrooms, it is demoralization. When a teacher is denied recognition, when motivation is starved, when the very society they build refuses to build them in return, then what emerges is not negligence, but despair. And despair is a dangerous soil upon which no nation can build a future. We demand miracles from them. We demand straight-A results, engineers, doctors, and leaders of tomorrow, yet we deny them the very tools that make miracles possible. We measure them against the impossible while giving them nothing to stand on. It is hypocrisy of the highest order to rebuke a teacher for poor performance while never asking ourselves whether we have performed our own duty to support them.
A teacher is not a machine that can run without fuel, nor a miracle-worker who can conjure success from thin air. A teacher is a human being, with a family to feed, with dignity to uphold, with personal dreams that deserve fulfillment. And when the nation humiliates its teachers, when it forces them to work in misery, when it robs them of the pride that should be the foundation of their service, the teacher bends, and when the teacher bends, the entire nation collapses with him.
That is why it pains me to see ministers stand at podiums, wagging fingers at striking teachers, their voices swollen with threats and arrogance. Demanding teachers to return to work or face dismissal, yet they know very well that the conditions they have created cannot enable them to produce good results. And that is why their own children are not in public schools. If these schools were as good as they claim, their children would be there. But they know what they serve the nation is not fit for their own.
If public schools are so excellent, why are their own sons and daughters in international schools, elite private academies, or tucked away in foreign boarding institutions? If Uganda’s health system is “world-class,” why do they fly abroad for treatment or book their families into private hospitals the moment a fever strikes? If they genuinely believed in what they force upon ordinary Ugandans, would they not gladly partake in it themselves? They know, deep down, that what they serve the rest of us is not edible, that it is poison.
It is easy to insult teachers when your child is not seated in a collapsing classroom, staring at a hungry teacher forced to moonlight as a boda-boda rider. It is easy to dismiss a strike as “self-dismissal” when your family is insulated from its consequences.
If our ministers’ children were all enrolled in public schools, the debate about teachers’ salaries wouldn’t go on for decades. Would classrooms still be leaking, textbooks missing, desks broken? Would teachers still be the lowest paid professionals, begging for increments in strikes that never materialize? Of course not. If their own children depended on the pride, energy, and stability of public-school teachers, reforms would not be promises, they would be realities delivered yesterday.
If ministers had to line up in Mulago Hospital when their children were sick, if their wives had to give birth in rural health centers without electricity or medicine, would our leaders still say government hospitals are better?
We must therefore confess that the pride of the teacher is the pride of the nation. Their dignity is our dignity. Their motivation is our future. The classroom mirrors the condition of the teacher’s heart, when he is respected, the classroom thrives; when he is humiliated, the classroom suffers. If we wish for excellence in our children, then we must first restore excellence in the treatment of their teachers.
The day we choose to pay them well, to honor them fully, to recognize them openly, will be the day we begin the true transformation of our society. For when a teacher teaches with pride, he plants courage, he builds vision, he shapes character, and he raises a generation capable of carrying this nation beyond its current struggles. But when a teacher teaches in misery, when he is reminded daily that his sacrifice means nothing, then the classroom becomes nothing more than a place of survival, and survival is never enough to build a nation.
The writer is the LC5 Male Youth Councillor for Rubanda District
Wilfred Arinda Nshekantebirwe
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