Times Live
By Vladimir Mzaca
6 November 2011
The Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture is on an ambitious drive to get a large chunk of the national budget for 2012, aiming to make sure that government continues to give top priority to the education sector.
Finance Minister Tendai Biti is expected to announce next year’s budget in the next two weeks.
In recent weeks his team has been on a countrywide consultative drive.
He is on record as saying that a huge share of the budget will go towards paying the civil service bill, while another considerable figure will go towards electoral reform.
However, Education Minister David Coltart has sent his wish list to Biti. “We want at least 22% of the budget. There is a lot to be done in the education sector to keep it alive,” said Coltart.
Coltart heads a ministry whose workers’ union activists do not shy away from threatening industrial action.
The minister has argued that there is a need to improve the working conditions of teachers for them to stay in service.
“The issue does not start or stop with their remuneration. Conditions of service are also important. Some schools have dilapidated infrastructure and textbooks are still an issue,” he added.
In Coltart’s view the ministry has always been underfunded, which is why problems are getting worse.
“If you are always short-changing the education sector, it always carries forward its burdens to a point that they become too many. That is why things are like this at the present moment,” he said.
In the 2011 budget the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture and the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education received the largest allocation of the government’s budget.
In 2010 Biti stated that 555 primary and 399 secondary schools had no desks. Furthermore, the textbook to pupil ratio was 1:15.
He also pointed out that at least 26% of primary classrooms needed repair.
In a drive to alleviate a textbook shortage, Unicef came up with a textbook distribution programme in 2010 that seeks to ensure a textbook to pupil ratio of 1:1 at primary schools.
It is difficult to gauge the success of this programme since it has not yet been evaluated.
Zimbabwe’s education system was once among the best in Africa. Since the turn of the century it has suffered a serious decline in public funding, along with hyperinflation and political unrest which has resulted in the mass exodus of teaching staff in search of greener pastures in neighbouring countries.
Biti said the projected budget for 2012 was $3.6-billion, so the 22% that Coltart referred to amounts to $750-million.