Hansard: Parliamentary question time 3 March 2010

Hansard

3 March 2010

Oral answers to questions made without notice

Mrs Nyamupinga:

I want to know if it is government policy that teachers ask for incentives from parents and if it is not a government policy, what are you doing about those teachers, especially in my constituency, who are exploiting parents asking for US$1 everyday?

The Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture (Senator Coltart):

I am pleased that this question was raised because it has attracted public debate. You know that in the budget presented by the Minister of Finance in December, this Hon. House had before it a budget of US$276 million for the education sector. If you take that down you will find that US$240 million has been allocated for the payment of teachers and that will leave a balance of US$36 million to run the Ministry of Education, Sports, Arts and Culture.

As you are aware there are approximately 3 million children that my Ministry is responsible for. If you do the mathematics, that converts to a paltry amount of US$1 per child per month and the Ministry has to run 8,000 schools in our country. This money is used to buy the fuel used to monitor the schools, to buy chalk, books and all the other expenses for an effective and efficient education system. I am sure all the Hon. Members will agree with me when I say it is simply insufficient. You cannot run a decent education system on US$1 per child per month. I am emphasising this specifically to illustrate to the Hon. Member the difficulties we have in delivering an education system to our people.

It was in that context that the whole issue of incentives was devised. If we had not allowed for the payment of incentives last year, we would even have had less education for our children than was in fact the case. I need to emphasise the legal context in which the incentives are meant to be charged because I am afraid there is a lot of lawlessness where the laid down laws are not being complied with. I will explain what those policies are so that Hon. Members can in turn explain to their constituencies.

There are existing education regulations which allow school development committees (SDCs) to raise levies, but they have to be done in a certain format. Prior to any levies being charged, a budget must be prepared by the SDC before calling for a meeting. This meeting will have to be properly convened and all parents and guardians should be given notice to attend. Once that meeting has been duly called, it has to be attended by at least 20% of the guardians and parents in that school who will form the quorum. If that quorum is not achieved that meeting is invalid.

At that meeting a budget must be presented by the SDC, and 50% of the parents who attend that meeting must vote in favour of the levies. Once that meeting is held and that budget has been approved the school must apply to the Permanent Secretary of Education to approve those levies. We said 10% of the levies raised in accordance with that process can be allocated to pay incentives to teachers but it must follow that process.

What is happening in our schools system is that processes are not complied with. Levies are being raised in other fashions and in some cases teachers are demanding incentives that are completely disconnected with the issue of levies, and those teachers who are doing so are acting illegally. In actual fact that amounts to extortion because those incentives have not been raised in the context of levies and it is unacceptable.

Let me conclude by saying what our policy is regarding incentives. It is very clear that incentives are discriminatory in the following sense; parents in rural areas are generally poorer and are battling to pay incentives, and teachers in rural areas are discriminated against compared to teachers in urban areas. It is a discriminatory policy, therefore it is unacceptable. It is a highly divisible policy because it is causing tension between teachers on the one hand and those parents who are struggling to pay. So, because of that, our policy is to dispense with incentives as soon as possible.

The problem that we face is that such a small amount was allocated to education in the national budget. It is very difficult to keep teachers adequately motivated unless we have allowed incentives. If we do not allow the incentives, I believe we would have had a far worse education system than it is. I would want to assure the Hon Members that at the earliest opportunity we will get rid of incentives and outlaw them. I want to throw the ball back into this Hon. House; the amount allocated to education in our budget was 12.8% in our national budget. And UNESCO recommends 22%. When we get 22% of our national budget or even less than that, if it can be 15% or 16% allocated to education so that we could pay teachers a viable salary that they deserve, then we will be able to end this issue of incentives overnight.

Mr Chikwinya:

If the Minister is acknowledging that there is lawlessness happening in the education sector, may he explain to the nation and this House, what his Ministry is doing to curb that lawlessness?

Senator Coltart:

First of all, at every opportunity, as is evidenced this afternoon, we are trying to educate Hon. Members and the public regarding the law relating to levies and the policy framework that I described this afternoon so that the parents themselves are empowered and they know the law so that they can deal with the breeches of the law at the hands of certain teachers. It is only at the hands of certain teachers; this is not an attack on the profession but the vast majority of our teachers are honourable, committed, professional people.

The second thing that we need to do is where we get hard evidence of this taking place. Unfortunately what we get is second hand evidence coming to us without details of which school and which teacher. I urge Hon. Members if you have hard evidence to bring it to the Ministry and we can then report the matter to the police, but the final thing which we need to do, but we cannot do, is to recommend the process of monitoring schools. We have hardly any functioning vehicles left to go out to schools physically themselves to find out what is happening at grassroots level so that this issue can be dealt with, and without our ability to monitor schools, it is very difficult for us to deal with the situation.

Mr Mangwana:

Hon. Minister, I am sure you acknowledge that there is no contractual liability on the part of parents to pay incentives. They are not the employers. You are asking parents to do what the employer should have done, that is the Public Service Commission. If you agree with me that this practice has no legal foundation, why are you not stopping it forthwith? You are acknowledging that it is divisive, segregative and it is burdening poor parents, so why are you not stopping it so that the Ministry of Public Service and Ministry of Finance can redress it?

Senator Coltart:

I am surprised to hear that question because I believe that the Hon. Member is here and he is a fellow of the legal profession. There are education regulations promulgated in the 1990s which allowed levies to be raised and they are not confined to the purchase of chalk and textbooks. The law allows for what has happened. Let me also stress that this policy was there prior to the time of the inclusive Government of last year. This is the policy I found already in place and it is a very important point.

The important thing is that there is a legal foundation to this when it is done properly and when a quorum or the threshold is reached and the votes are passed properly and when the Permanent Secretary has approved the levies agreed on by the parents, it is then that it is a lawful situation. The problem that we face is that the levies have not been passed, the meetings have not been called and in some cases the individual teachers have decided to raise the incentives themselves. The problem that we face is that until education is adequately financed, if we remove these incentives overnight, I fear that it will result in many teachers either leaving the profession or not being motivated in the classroom. We may remove the discrimination and the division, but may be left with an education system that is worse off. My view is that if together we have responsibility to find sufficient resources to pay teachers what they should be paid and remove the incentives and to promulgate new legislation.

Mr Kanzama:

Considering all the problems that you are facing in the Ministry, can you confirm that it is a result of sanctions?

Mr Speaker:

Order, there is no supplementary question.

Mr Dzirutwe:

My question is directed to the Deputy Prime Minister. There has been some confusion on the key Government department as we do not seem to know under which Ministry it falls. I am talking about DDF. Is it supposed to be under Local Government or under the President’s Office? Can you clarify under which Ministry it is?

The Deputy Prime Minister (Prof. Mutambara):

Mr Speaker, Sir, the DDF is under the Ministry of Transport, but if you have DDF questions about its operations and so on, I would direct them to my colleagues in the Ministry of Transport.

Mrs Mangami:

My question is directed to the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, what is your Ministry doing to achieve education for all by 2015, considering the different incentives that are in schools and the exorbitant levies that are prevailing in our schools?

The Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture (Senator Coltart):

Are we going to achieve education for all by the year 2015? It is important that we are all honest as Hon. Members of Parliament to the public. The reality is that we will not deliver a quality education to all our children by 2015 – that is the reality. The reality of our situation today is that we have a form of our education rather than an education that is of a qualitative substance. We have schools, physical buildings, and teachers in the classrooms, but the reality is that our education system has declined dramatically in the last two decades.

Education has been under-funded by a succession of governments since the late 1980s in our country. That has totally undermined our ability to achieve education for all by 2015. This is going to involve a painstaking effort on behalf of our country to get anywhere near that goal. What we have to do initially, is to restore a basic education for all our children and to build from that basic education. I hesitate, this afternoon, to give any indication to this Honourable House when we can expect a quality education for our children.

Mr Chinyadza:

My question again is directed to the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture. The problem that we have is that in the past we were told that the government was going to provide textbooks, especially for primary school children. I would like to know from the Minister whether this is still the policy and when we can expect textbooks for primary schools?

The Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture (Senator Coltart):

I do have positive and good news for the Hon. Members this afternoon. Mr Speaker, you may be aware that we established something called the ‘Education Transition Fund’ last year. This is a fund which I chair, and which is managed by UNICEF – we have a very good and productive relationship with UNICEF. The members of this fund are donor countries and international organisations like UNICEF and UNESCO. In the past four to five months since the Education Transition Fund was established, we have raised in the region of US$30million. That money is now going to be applied in the first instance to the production of textbooks for primary schools. You may have seen advertisements in December last year calling out to production and publishing houses to tender for this program. The process is now taking place. Two weeks ago I met with the Country Director for UNICEF, Dr Peter Salama, who is in the final clause of repeating these contracts. Within the next couple of weeks, contracts will be signed with Zimbabwe publishing houses to produce core textbooks initially for the primary school sector.

Further to the question raised by the Hon. Member on education for all by 2015 – we are focussing on all textbooks initially in the primary schools, mainly Maths, Environmental Science, English and Indigenous Languages – the main line indigenous languages. For the first time as well, we are also aiming to have textbooks printed for the so-called ‘Marginalised Indigenous Languages such as Kalanga, Tonga, Nambia and Suthu. This will be the first time that textbooks for those languages are produced. In the course of the next five to six months we target the publishing of 9,000,000 textbooks for primary schools, and these will be distributed to all primary schools countrywide.

Once we have completed the exercise for primary schools, we will then be going on to address the secondary school issue. Mr Speaker, one of the major problems that I found when assuming office was that our textbook pupil ratio had plummeted alarmingly. In many schools the only textbook is the one that the teacher had, and in most schools at best the textbook pupil ratio is 1:15 or 1:16. Our hope is that if we are able to deliver within the next six months these textbooks, we will reduce those textbook pupil ratios to 1:2 and possibly in some subjects to 1:1.

I think this will be a significant development in the education sector and will in itself take us through each stride towards delivering a quality education to our children as soon as possible.