guest column:Bothwell Riside ZIMBABWE like any other nation globally has been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Daily statistics are showing we have not reached the peak of the infections. Ignorance and arrogance will definitely impact negatively in the quest to fight the pandemic. Never have we seen in our lifetime a situation whereby the whole nation and world at large are brought to a standstill by a disease. We have had the deadly Ebola in West Africa, but it never threatened our nation a little. With the locally transmitted cases surging, one question in mind is what of our education sector. If education is affected, it means the impact of the pandemic will live with us for the next decades even if a permanent solution is going to be found. The postponement of the opening of the schools for the second term though necessary is not a good piece of news. Of course life is more important than education and at the same time we can’t ignore the short and long-term impact of tampering with our education. Thinking of schools that entirely depend on fees to pay for all their educational inputs shows we are in unprecedented times. E-learning Never had Zimbabwe as a nation relied on distance electronic learning. While distance e-learning has never been part of the system, it is popular in most countries where one even goes to the extent of getting a PHD just after attending virtual classes. Many of Zimbabwean scholars have done their education online. A research on the implementation of the use of computers in the teaching and learning situation in Zimbabwe indicated that less than 10% of the schools are using ICT in the day-to-day learning activities. For those 10% , very few use ICT-based technologies for instructions. This is quite unfortunate for a country like Zimbabwe, 40 years after independence. We remember how the government in 1980 made the education sector its priority. It was one of the sectors that experienced phenomenal growth both in terms of educational inputs and outputs. Today in the COVID-19 wake, most schools are relying on inferior platforms that were not designed for teaching and learning but merely communication. Platforms like WhatsApp although offering fast and real time collaborations do not provide proper support for distance e-learning. But what can we do if this is the only available platform we have? Where are we in terms of ICT? The most undoing thing in Zimbabwe today is the unaffordability of the internet. I would want to say comparatively in US dollar terms it is cheap, but the level of poverty in the nation makes internet unaffordable. Taking into consideration that the teacher who must be imparting knowledge may not afford the costs of the internet, breaks the whole system of education. The same applies to the parents, they rarely afford the internet costs. To make matters worse, the only gadget affordable to some is a cellphone and online teaching and learning require a laptop because of its versatility. Just like the health sector, the education sector must plan for life dur