The Guardian 

By David Smith

5 October 2011

Remains thought to belong to victims of 1980s Gukurahundi massacre discovered after football pitch caves in.

A mass grave containing up to 60 victims of a massacre by President Robert Mugabe’s troops has reportedly been discovered by children playing football at a Zimbabwe school.

The pupils stumbled on human bones sticking out of the ground after their football pitch caved in during a game, according to New Zimbabwe.com. The remains are thought to belong to victims of the 1980s Gukurahundi massacre, in which an estimated 20,000 civilians were killed by Mugabe’s feared Fifth Brigade in the western Matabeleland province.

Moses Mzila Ndlovu, the minister for national healing, reconciliation and integration, reportedly visited the site at St Paul secondary school in Lupane last Friday.

He was quoted by New Zimbabwe.com as saying: “Villagers told me that St Paul and several other local schools were used as detention points by the Fifth Brigade. Dozens of people were detained, interrogated and executed before their bodies were dumped in mass graves dug up by the detainees.”

He added: “The grave is roughly 5×5 metres and locals told me there could be anything between 30 and 60 people buried there.”

School authorities have temporarily refilled the graves and the minister said he would be asking the cabinet to agree on a programme of reburials on a wider scale across Matabeleland and the Midlands.

The Gukurahundi massacre followed a bitter power struggle between Mugabe and his rival Joshua Nkomo. The Fifth Brigade, which received training in North Korea, was accused of indiscriminate killings and torture of Nkomo’s supporters while the world turned a blind eye. Gukurahundi – a Shona word for the spring rains that sweep away dry season chaff – remains an open wound of Mugabe’s 31-year rule.

David Coltart, Zimbabwe’s education minister, said: “It is inevitable that these types of revelations will occur as there are numerous mass graves throughout Matabeleland. It does underscore the need for a meaningful process of truth telling and reconciliation.”

Coltart warned against a repeat of an incident earlier this year when hundreds of skeletons were found in a remote mine shaft in Mount Darwin, 100 miles from Harare. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party claimed the dead were victims of white colonial-era soldiers and were accused of using state media to turn their fate into election propaganda.

“It is important that these discoveries are not politicised,” added Coltart, a member of the Movement for Democratic Change. “These are the remains of loved ones of people who still live in the areas the remains are found in. It is important that we do not repeat the shameful actions which occurred when remains were found in Mount Darwin.

“It is important that professional archaeologists and anthropologists are engaged in the process of the recovery and reburial of the remains. It is also important that the local community be involved to ensure that local customs, traditions and rites are complied with.”

The sentiment was echoed by Mzila Ndlovu, the local MDC MP, who told New Zimbabwe.com: “The local community must say where and how they want the reburials to occur. But first I would wish that the cabinet can reach an agreement on a national programme that can be put in place to deal with the specific crimes of the Fifth Brigade.”

But Ndlovu warned that it may be impossible to get Zanu-PF to permit a programme of mass exhumations and reburials. “We need to reach agreement to move forward. I want to say the attitude of Zanu-PF people is shocking. The attitudes are hostile, which shows a lack of willingness to deal with Gukurahundi.”

BBC

5 October 2011

Thousands of children in Zimbabwe, who were forcibly evicted from their homes six years ago, are still not receiving proper education, a rights group says.

The government had promised 700,000 families a better life when it demolished slums in major cities in 2005 under Operation Murambatsvina.

But Amnesty International says many children are now worse off, attending “makeshift” schools in new settlements.

Education Minister David Coltart said Amnesty’s report was “credible”.

Mr Coltart, a senior member of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which formed a unity government with President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in 2009 to end years of conflict.

“These children were displaced [by the Zanu-PF government],” he told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.

But he said the unity government had made “great strides” in tackling the education crisis.

Zimbabwe had one of the best education systems in Africa after independence in 1980, but it collapsed after 2000 when the country was hit by political conflict and hyperinflation, analysts say.

‘Sex work’

In its report Left behind: The impact of Zimbabwe’s mass forced evictions on the right to education, Amnesty said the government had taken a “step backward” when it launched Operation Murambatsvina, which means “clean out the filth” in the local Shona language.

It demolished shack settlements in Harare and other cities, before moving people to new areas under Operation Garikai (Better Life).

The government had removed children from areas where they had education and six years later it had failed to build schools in the new settlements, the report said.

This had forced communities to set up “make-shift” schools, striking a “devastating blow to the lives and dreams of thousands of children”.

“The new settlements are worse then where people [lived],” Simeon Mawanza, who authored the Amnesty report, told the BBC.

“If there is no serious investment by the government, these people will be condemned to a life of poverty and suffering.”

Mr Coltart said he was aware that unregistered schools had “mushroomed” because of the relocations and he was was trying to deal with the issue.

In 2008, 90,000 teachers were on strike and 8,000 schools were closed, meaning that children received only 27 “educational days”, the education minister said.

“There was a calamitous situation… Our policy has been to stabilise the education sector, but we acknowledge we still got a lot of work to do,” he told the BBC.

Amnesty said young women it had spoken to had decided to get married because they could no longer go to school.

It quoted one a 17-year-old girl as saying she married “so that I could have someone to provide for me. I did not want to go into sex work like most of the girls who dropped out of school”.

Amnesty said many of those evicted were promised basic housing but they are still living in poorly built shacks and plastic shelters.

The evictions were widely seen at the time as an attempt by the Zanu-PF government to disrupt growing support for the MDC in the build-up to the 2005 parliament election.

Zanu-PF won the poll, which the MDC condemned as a sham.

Three years later, after disputed and violence-marred presidential and parliamentary elections, Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Mugabe agreed to form a coalition government.

Mr Mugabe has said new elections, which will herald the end of the coalition, will take place next year.

Tension between the two parties has been rising ahead of the poll.

The Guardian

By David Smith

4 October 2011

Guy Scott says post-colonial condition is behind Zambia and urges other African states to move beyond race.

Guy Scott believes his appointment could push other African nations to come to terms with their colonial histories.

He is outspoken, has the popular touch and just became the second most powerful man in Zambia. He also possesses something now rarely seen at the top of African politics: white skin.

Guy Scott, born to British immigrants in what was then Northern Rhodesia, believes his appointment last week as vice-president could push other African countries to come to terms with their colonial histories and move beyond race. One senior Zambian figure described it as “the crossing of the political Rubicon”.

Effectively just a heartbeat away from the presidency, Scott is believed to be the first white person to hold such high office on the continent since the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.

Unlike that coercive regime, Scott won his home constituency by a landslide in last month’s national election and was subsequently named as deputy to the country’s new president, Michael Sata.

In his first international interview since the move, Scott, also a regular columnist and blogger, said: “It feels rather good, especially as it turns out to be a very popular appointment, which is flattering. There’s been no hint of any resentment of a white man being made vice-president.”

The 67-year-old grandfather is an anomaly in Africa, where decolonisation saw the widespread establishment of black majority governance and the dwindling of many white populations. But Zambia, he suggests, is opening a fresh chapter.

“I have long suspected Zambia is moving from a post-colonial to a cosmopolitan condition,” Scott said. “People’s minds are changing. They are no longer sitting back and dwelling on what was wrong about a colonialism. There’s a Caribbeanisation, there’s a range of colours – so what?”

Asked if he could imagine a white vice-president in neighbouring Zimbabwe, which became independent in 1980, he replied: “We’ve been independent since 1964 so maybe we’re a little ahead in the forgive-and-forget game. I don’t think racism has much mileage in Zimbabwe. Maybe it’s a lesson that will push a few others in Africa.”

The impact of colonialism remains a key faultline in African politics. Some commentators have pointed to corrupt dictatorships and crumbling infrastructure to argue that liberation movements betrayed their promise of a better life.

Others contend that the artificial boundaries drawn by colonial powers, and their continued pursuit of Africa’s natural resources today, sowed a disastrous legacy not easily undone.

Perhaps at the risk of controversy, Scott opined: “People are nostalgic, not for exploitation and division, but for the standards of colonial times. When you went to the hospital there was medicine, when you went to schools there were books, when you went to the shops there were goods to buy.

“There is a sense of these as being ‘white man’s standards’. Whether rightly or not rightly is another matter.”

Born in Livingstone, Scott’s background is intertwined with Britain’s imperial age. His father, from Glasgow, emigrated to Northern Rhodesia in 1927 and worked as a doctor on the railway conceived by Cecil Rhodes, as well as becoming a leading politician, lawyer and newspaper publisher.

His mother, from Watford, moved there in 1940. Scott studied maths and economics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gained a doctorate in cognitive science at Sussex University, and lectured and researched in robotics at Oxford. He has two sons living in Britain, a daughter studying there and another son working in Zambia. Scott has spent years working for the Zambian government. He is a former agriculture minister credited with steering the country out of a food crisis after a drought in the early 1990s.

Mark Chona, former special assistant for political affairs under Zambia’s founding president Kenneth Kaunda, said Scott was popular because “he followed in his father’s footsteps.”

He explained: “His father, Dr Alexander Scott, was a politician who represented African interests when they could not represent themselves in the colonial parliament. The family have been identified with African interests for years. So Guy Scott won massively against many ‘native’ Zambians in his constituency.”

Of the significance of Scott’s appointment, Chona said: “It shows people are colour blind and what they are looking at is performance, not colour. To that extent, it’s not strange and surprising, but for others it probably is. Here colour doesn’t matter.

“It very much indicates that Zambia has moved very far. It is the crossing of the political Rubicon in the thinking of Zambians that we are getting used to having a white vice-president.”

Scott’s high profile is unusual but not unique.

Despite the mass eviction of white farmers and president Robert Mugabe’s fiercely racial rhetoric, Zimbabwe has a white education minister, David Coltart. Roy Bennett, a senior ally of prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai, is also white. In South Africa, numerous white activists joined the fight against apartheid and some went on to hold posts in the African National Congress government.

The continued economic power of the white minority remains a highly contentious issue.

Blessing-Miles Tendi, a Zimbabwean political analyst and expert in African history and politics at Oxford University, said: “Zimbabwe has already gone down the road of racial inclusiveness in government. Mugabe followed a policy of reconciliation in 1980. A number of white Rhodesian elements were in government while the colonial era heads of intelligence and the military were retained.

“Other African countries simply lack signficant numbers of local whites so its a hard example to replicate. In other countries the memory of white domination is still too recent and whites control disproportionate amounts of economic wealth (South Africa and Namibia are good examples) to the degree that replicating Zambia’s example is a bit far-fetched for now.”

New Zimbabwe.com

4 October 2011

Sundowns boss Patrice Motsepe says the club will accept any punishment meted out to his players Method Mwanjali and Nyasha Mushekwi after they were named in a ZIFA report into match fixing.

FIFA has encouraged ZIFA to impose severe penalties, including life bans, on close to 80 players, coaches and ex-ZIFA officials revealed to have taken bungs from Asian betting syndicates to lose matches while playing for Zimbabwe.

Mushekwi and Mwanjali, who captains both his country and Sundowns, insist they were mere pawns along with their teammates in an elaborate racket orchestrated by the former ZIFA CEO, Henrietta Rushwaya, who was sacked from her job.

Motsepe said: “This is not only an issue of a legal matter but also of ethics.

“We will cooperate fully with FIFA and the officials from Zimbabwe with whatever they want from us. It is important that we not only comply with the rules but also promote the spirit of fair play and ethics that FIFA espouses.”

Rushwaya, according to the ZIFA probe, organised several unsanctioned trips to Asian countries between 2007 and 2009 by the national team.

Singaporean national Wilson Raj Perumal, now serving time in a Finland jail after admitting fraud and match fixing there, paid Zimbabwe players thousands of dollars to lose matches by a set score. Rushwaya is thought to be pocketed up of US$250,000 in the scam which also sucked in club side, Monomotapa.

ZIFA’s former programmes officer, Jonathan Musavengana, and marketing officer, Harry Taruva, are also damned by the ZIFA probe report which has been handed over to the police, FIFA and Sports Minister David Coltart.

www.thezimbabwemail.com

By Robson Sharuko

4 October 2011

The House of Assembly has adopted a motion to set up a commission of enquiry to investigate the role played by key stakeholders in the Warriors’ matchfixing scandal.

The committee to be set up will chief among other things investigate the role played by the Sports and Recreation Commission (SRC) and ZIFA in the Asiagate scandal.

This development could see administrators involved in the disgraceful act being handed over to the police and the Anti Corruption Commission.

The new ZIFA board has already fired four members of the secretariat and suspended three ZIFA board members implicated in the biggest scandal to rock local soccer.

The commission will also seek to find out the role of the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture in sport.

This comes after the august house noted with concern the failure by government through the responsible ministry headed by MDC Senator David Coltart to come up with a comprehensive sports policy that creates a conducive environment for sports development.

Government has been under scrutiny from stakeholders who have attributed the country’s sporting misfortunes on the failure to have clear developmental policies from the grass roots.

VOA

By Peta Thornycroft

4 October 2011

Children sift through garbage at a dumpsite in Harare, Zimbabwe, on President Robert Mugabe’s 87th birthday, February 21, 2011.

Amnesty International says that hundreds of thousands of children were deprived of education after Zimbabwe’s former ZANU-PF government smashed up their homes and their parents’ businesses in 2005.  Amnesty International said all the gains Zimbabwe had made in education were lost in the urban social upheaval that followed President Robert Mugabe’s ‘clean out the trash’ campaign, called “Murambatsvina” in the majority Shona language.

About two million urban Zimbabweans were shocked and traumatized in May 2005 when police moved on high density suburbs in Harare and second city Bulawayo and began knocking down houses and small businesses.

Mr. Mugabe said the campaign was aimed at cleaning up cities, which he said had become overcrowded with illegal residencies and buildings.

Most self-employed artisans, especially around Harare, were forced out of business when their preimses were knocked down.

After the campaign began, some people, including those in legal dwellings, knocked down their homes themselves to preserve the building materials.

Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday that it recently undertook follow-up research in suburbs on the outskirts of Harare that were severely affected by the campaign.

It said that in a large section of a poor suburb, Hatcliffe Extension, not far from Mr. Mugabe’s palatial private residence, every small house was flattened.  People lived among the rubble protecting the remains of their small possessions.

Amnesty said in the same suburb, a school built by a humanitarian agency, and registered with the education ministry, had been knocked down. It said several schools in other settlements were forced to close.

The United Nations estimated about about two million people were affected by the ‘Murambatsvina’ campaign.

It said many children whose parents’ homes were knocked down were forced to go and live in rural areas where they were not welcome.  Many children whose parents lost their homes or businesses or both were unable to pay school fees.

Amnesty reports that political analysts say that “Murambatsvina” was designed to destabilize the then-opposition Movement for Democratic Change, as its support came mainly from urban areas at that time.

The MDC, which won elections in 2008, is now in an inclusive government with Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party.

Amnesty International recommended that the government and humanitarian agencies address what it calls the “systematic violations of the right to education of children and young people” stemming from the “Murambatsvina” campaign.

However, Zimbabwe’s Education Minister David Coltart says he has less than $2 a month to spend on each child’s education as the majority of his budget is spent on teachers’ salaries.

• Congrats to Tuskers for their comprehensive win over the Mountaineers – took up where they left at the end of the last Zim domestic season #
• Drove from Bulawayo to Harare today and it seems as if the entire countryside is burnt – we are creating a desert before our very eyes #
• Zambia: President Sata names Guy Scott as Vice president and reduces cabinet to 19 ministries – LusakaTimes.com http://t.co/phzmlo5r #
• Coltart says teacher’s incentives a ‘necessary evil’ for now: http://t.co/xn6ppnNr via @AddThis #
• For a Disabled African, Doors Swinging Open: http://t.co/4YYNk40z Energy Maburutse KG VI and Petra High School old boy doing good in the USA #
• Its raining in Bulawayo – nothing quite as sweet as the smell of the first Zimbabwean rains after a long dry winter #

Bulawayo24.com

By Moyo Roy

2 October 2011

The Government has made a U-turn on its decision to freeze the recruitment of temporary teachers following indications that the country has a shortage of qualified tutors.

Last month, the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture stopped recruiting temporary teachers citing the need to replace them with qualified teachers.

The ministry had also barred qualified teachers from going on leave.

In an interview on the sidelines of the Bulawayo Province Schools Merit Awards last week, Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Senator David Coltart said temporary teachers were crucial to the education sector.

He said suspending them was an “ill-timed decision”.

“What I should emphasise is that at the moment, we cannot expect to meet the requirements of the teaching sector,” he said.

“We are far from a scenario where 100 percent of our teachers are qualified. Until we have such a scenario, it is inevitable that we have these temporary teachers.”

The minister said while Government preferred qualified teachers, it would take long to normalise the education sector.

“We can’t simply go and get rid of temporary teachers. It is a gradual process that can never happen overnight.

“When you go to places like Binga, you will find that most of the schools are being manned by temporary teachers.

“So, it wouldn’t be sincere on our part to just try and get rid of them because we will be indirectly negating our education sector.

“As it stands, we are far from meeting the requirements of teachers. With that background, we can’t honestly think of getting rid of these temporary teachers.”

Meanwhile, the minister said Government would not lower passing standards of the Zimbabwe School Examinations Council (Zimsec) in order to improve the country’s overall pass rate.

Last year, the country recorded a pass rate of 25 percent with Bulawayo province recording 19,8 percent.

Senator Coltart said although most countries in the region had taken this route, his ministry would not “cheat itself”.

“We know that there are some countries in the region that reduced their standards so as to improve the pass rate.

“Even Cambridge did the same. However, as a country, we are never going to take that route. Instead, we will strive to improve the quality of teaching and this includes teacher remuneration.”

He added that the authorities were working on ensuring teachers carried out their duties.

He said eight million textbooks would be distributed to primary and secondary schools under the second phase of the Education Transition Fund (ETF).

“In the long run, we aim to achieve a ratio of one pupil: one textbook and it is a well-known fact that when students have their own textbooks they perform far much better.

“This, thereby, naturally means our pass rate will surely improve.

“It is not as though we are just sitting back and hoping things will go back to normal just like that. We are doing everything possible to maintain our high education standards.”

Herald

1 October 2011

Government is investigating circumstances surrounding evictions of headmasters and teaching staff at Anglican Church-run schools as it suspects the actions were disturbing learning activities.

Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister David Coltart, said while he did not want to involve himself in the Anglican Church saga, it was imperative to establish whether the evictions being carried out by the deputy sheriff had no effect on pupils.

In an interview yesterday, Minister Coltart said he had asked the permanent secretary, Dr Stephen Mahere, to send an emissary to find out what was happening at the schools. “About two weeks ago, I told the permanent secretary to dispatch the principal education director in Mashonaland East to visit the affected schools to investigate and report back on what was happening,” Minister Coltart said.

“I was expecting the report on Monday but I did not get it. I sent another memorandum to the permanent secretary on Wednesday asking for the report but I am still to get it. “Once I get that report, I will be able to assess the circumstances and effect on children.”

Minister Coltart said that he had made it clear that whatever was going to be the outcome would have to be done in the best interest of pupils. Government, the minister said, would not tolerate disruptions to lessons.

The deputy sheriff recently embarked on an eviction exercise, evicting some priests, headmasters and senior nursing staff on behalf of the Anglican Church Province of Zimbabwe led by Bishop Nolbert Kunonga. These people were evicted for their allegiance to the Church of the Province of Central Africa’s Harare Diocese led by Bishop Chad Gandiya.

The evictions followed a Supreme Court judgment that gives custody of the property to Bishop Kunonga.

Bishop Kunonga is set to claim the Bernard Mzeki Shrine in Marondera, St Johns Chikwaka Mission and Shearley Cripps Children’s Home in Murehwa using the same Supreme Court order.

Herald

30 September 2011

Opinion

The debate over the desirability of inducements for schoolteachers paid by parents is driven by several factors: education ideologies, poor civil service pay for graduates, inadequate funds from Treasury to support even minimum school standards, inequalities within the education system, inequalities in parental incomes, and the geographical distribution of members of the teachers’ unions.

We do not envy the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, Senator David Coltart, and his senior civil service professionals as they try to chart a course through all the conflicting advice they receive and the desires articulated by so many groups.

At the heart of the debate is a perception of unfairness: some parents can pay more than others, some teachers get far better pay than others, and some schools are seen to be far better than others.

This is balanced by some very harsh facts: the education system needs a lot more money than the Government can provide from taxes; teachers need better pay if the best are to be retained and desirable youngsters encouraged to enter the profession; and we have seen in many countries that total equality means equality at the lowest level, not the highest.

We cannot see any way to raise the quality of our schools unless parents are prepared to pay. We have said this several times before. Even developed countries struggle to pay for free education for all, and a developing country like Zimbabwe simply cannot afford this.

That fact has to be accepted. The debate then moves into how much parents should pay, and what should that extra money be spent on. The Education Act is quite clear on one point. Levies, in whatever form, are fixed with the agreement of a majority of the parents at each school. The very low fees charged by State schools are fixed by the minister, but anything above these needs parental support.

Obviously some parents are willing to pay more than others, so each school will set different rates. There is a growing trend for parents to choose schools that have levies within their range, eroding the old zoning.

All this means that some school development associations will have far more money than others. The Act allows inequalities as part of the drive for better quality.

Now comes the trickier decision on what the money raised can be spent on. Books, teaching equipment, school maintenance and the like are obvious. Extra teachers have always been allowed. The one change in recent years has been permission to top-up salaries, those inducements.

At some schools these are paid out of a general levy fund, with no teacher knowing which pupil in the class has paid what. At others the inducements are paid by each pupil directly to the teacher. And at many rural schools there are no inducements at all.

Right now we cannot see any alternative but to allow inducements to continue. It is better that some teachers are properly paid than all teachers are inadequately paid. But we think that these inducements should be paid by the SDA from a general levy fund so that at least there is an agreed system of fairness within each school and no teacher knows who has or has not paid.

That still leaves inequalities between schools and a divide between urban teachers, almost all of whom receive at least something extra, and rural schools, where most receive nothing beyond their basic salary.

Admittedly the divide is narrowed by the near universal provision of free or highly-subsidised housing at most rural schools. It can be narrowed further, if not this year then soon, by an agreement that anything extra the ministry can extract from the Treasury will go towards a rural allowance.

The teachers unions are unanimously against inducements. Part of that stand derives from the desire for equality of pay, with salaries dependent only on qualifications and seniority, which is common to teachers’ unions around the world.

That common union stand has led to disputes in many countries as more and more authorities switch to pay policies that reward effectiveness as well. In finding a balance between the advantages of quality and equality, it has been found that some degree of inequality does lead to a rise in quality. Fixing that balance is tricky.

The other reason in Zimbabwe for the teachers’ unions to oppose inducements is the geographical distribution of their members. It is well known that most urban teachers do not belong to a union and that most rural teachers do. Unions cannot be faulted for reflecting the views of most of their members, but the ministry has to look at the bigger picture.

We believe that the ministry needs a clearer comprehensive policy to continue its perpetual struggle to improve quality while ameliorating the worst effects of inequality. This can be done by staggering State support. The better off urban communities could get nothing except the minimum contingent of teachers and their basic salaries, paying for everything else themselves.

The poorest urban communities could get a little more help, but the ministry making it clear that just about everything it gets over and above its salary bill will be allocated to the most needy schools, almost all of which will be rural.

At the same time aid agencies, who are usually willing to buy things but not pay people, can be encouraged to help rural communities upgrade teachers’ housing and even help fund flats at some urban schools.

We need to remember that there is no obvious solution to the conflicting ideas, but at the same time let us remember that the education system has advanced significantly in quality in the last three years as parents take over more responsibilities.

The minister needs to keep that growing parental support, but can take care to remove any abuses, such as children suffering for the sins of their parents, and reallocate his own meagre resources and whatever external aid he can gather to the most needy.