With our correspondent in Kinshasa, Patient Ligodi

This retirement currently only benefits teachers from public primary schools. Mukuna Daniel is 80 years old. He has been teaching for 57 years. Tired, this father of twelve children is still waiting for his situation to be regularized.

Among the students he has trained, some have become engineers and doctors, he recalls, but his own situation is miserable. "Look at me today, I came on foot and I will go home on foot. If they gave me, for example, 15,000 dollars so I could buy a plot of land, live while waiting for death, that could work for me."

But his end-of-career compensation will not reach that amount. He will receive less than 3,000 dollars.

Decline in quality of education

Cécile Tshiyombo, general secretary of the Union of Teachers of Congo (SYECO), is aware of the situation, but she is pleased with this first step and hopes that the allocation will improve. "This is a first. The money was not sought elsewhere. We did not go to the World Bank to find the money. We protested and we found the money. These are our own resources."

For his part, the Minister of Primary, Secondary and Technical Education, Tony Mwaba, insists that this process must be accelerated because having teachers work at retirement age has unfortunate consequences: "This situation is one of the major factors that has unfortunately contributed to the drastic decline in the level and quality of basic education in our country."

The other task is to ensure continued support for newly retired teachers through the teachers' fund which will, according to the minister, soon be operational.