Newsday
Editorial
29th April 2014
THE landmark sweeping changes made by Primary and Secondary Education minister Lazarus Dokora over the past few months cannot go unchallenged.
The new policy directives are likely to reverse gains made during the era of his predecessor David Coltart.
Despite being a non-educationist, Coltart literally resurrected the sector, as when Education minister between 2009 and 2013, he introduced a raft of measures which included direct foreign funding and mass provision of learning materials into the education sector.
The MDC minister also religiously defended the introduction of teachers’ incentives and paid-for extra lessons as some of the measures to incentivise the poorly-paid teachers.
However, his former subordinate and Zanu PF successor Dokora seems to have embarked on a mission to reverse all that for no apparent reason.
Could it be another Zanu PF populist policy directive?
A few weeks before last year’s harmonised elections, Local Government minister Ignatius Chombo made a similar policy directive when he ordered all local authorities to write off ratepayers’ unpaid bills. The results of that order are clear for all who care to see the poor service delivery and state of disrepair of infrastructure at local authorities.
One wonders as to who such policy directives are meant to benefit. It’s true Coltart’s measures had a net effect of imposing an additional financial burden on the already-overburdened parents. But the same parents Dokora is trying to protect seemed comfortable with that extra expense as long as it guaranteed their children better results.
What makes the whole circus more astounding is the fact that the policy directives are made and announced without prior consultation with key stakeholders – teachers’ unions, parents’ associations and other more experienced educationists.
Granted, some of the extra lessons and teachers’ incentives had given root to a culture of laziness and greed, but the good thing at the end of the day is these measures had greatly enhanced the country’s pass rates at all levels and economically empowered the teachers.
What Dokora should have done was to consult widely and then gradually remove the extra financial burden on parents in tandem with an equal injection of capital into the sector by government and the private sector.
It’s no secret that Dokora’s wholesale ban on teachers’ incentives and paid extra lessons will undermine Zimbabwe’s reputation as a leading education provider in Africa.
Results of last year’s Zimsec “O†Level results are sure proof to the fact that with additional incentives, teachers can go an extra mile and produce better results.
Of the 285 260 candidates who sat for Zimsec “O†Level examinations, 36 031 candidates passed five subjects and above with a Grade C or better, translating to a 20,72% pass rate. This is a 2,32 percentage points increase on the 18,4% recorded in 2012.
Although the results were still below par, they compared well with the results achieved by those who sat for the public examinations for the past two decades or so.
As things stand now, the country stands assured a much lower pass rate this year given the withdrawal of these incentives. This is especially so considering that the massive salary hike that the teachers were expecting this year has remained pie in the sky.