Sunday Independent 

By Peta Thornycroft

28 September 2011

When Tendai Biti quips that he is a finance minister without any “finance”, his audience in a church hall in Harare nodded and smiled. They knew that when Biti went into the treasury for the first time as finance minister in 2009 he found his Zanu PF predecessor had left him little more than petty cash to run the country and about R50 billion in foreign debt.

Labourers, clerks, domestic workers, vendors, activists, artisans, a handful of mostly middle-aged, shabby whites and many unemployed people understood Biti’s joke because they too were demolished by hyperinflation, the lynch pin of Zanu PF’s decade long tsunami – they too have no ‘finance.’

Biti was reporting back to his constituency last week after months of failing to get police permission to hold the meeting. So he went ahead anyway, but without advance publicity the audience was small, more intimate town-hall conversation than grandstand report back.

He explained for the first time some of the hazards of being in government with Zanu PF, why he and cabinet colleagues found it so difficult to get the country moving again.

Biti told the meeting his party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) ‘saved’ Zimbabwe by going into the inclusive government with Zanu PF which it defeated in elections a year earlier.

He told constituents that during negotiations he had opposed MDC joining an inclusive government but that he can say now, 31 months later, it was the right decision because it gave Zimbabweans “time out, time out (to recover from Zanu PF violence) as we were being scorched.”

As dusk became night around Northside Community Church in upmarket Borrowdale, someone lugged a generator to light up the hall and it tut-tut-tutted into action as an accompaniment to Biti’s heartfelt accounting to his supporters of life in government with Zanu PF.

Biti said the MDC now understood “the levers of power in government. And now we know the myths too.”

The levers of power, Biti says, are not vested in policy makers such as he but in the bureaucrats. It’s public information these days that Zanu PF ministers who nod off during Tuesday morning’s cabinet meetings spend only a few hours per week attending to ministry business. They are either working for Zanu PF or attending to the farms they have been given since 2000.

The permanent secretaries in jobs-for-life run their ministries and are as important to Zanu PF’s political survival as the security forces.

“The bureaucrat who is unelected but who is so powerful that if you are not clever he keeps you busy without being busy,” Biti said.

Many insiders in government say that Biti’s permanent secretary is particularly obstructive.  Mugabe ignores much in the three-year-old multi party political agreement he signed under mediation by former South African President Thabo Mbeki and unilaterally appointed most top civil servants. He is supposed to consult MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai before making any senior appointments.

Biti was speaking to his audience in Shona and English and sometimes interweaving the two and surprised some when he said that that it no longer mattered to him that Zanu PF controlled the security ministries.

He said: “I learned that the secret of good governance is not constitutions, it’s not about the army or the police, it is about love and caring. It is better to run the social ministries.

“It is better to be in charge of health and education than the police.

“We had a vision to democratise our country when the MDC was formed in 1999. We wanted to put an end to 20 years of cruelty, 20 years of theft, of fear, and this has been a long and tortuous road.”

And it is not over yet and the struggle goes on each day often within the ministries. David Coltart, the Education Minister from the other MDC faction, is regularly obstructed by his permanent secretary.

Biti, somehow more physically frail as minister than he was as activist, said: “I turned 45 three or so weeks ago but I feel I am 87 years of age.” And there was muted amusement among the crowd because everyone in the hall knew that President Robert Mugabe is 87.

“My life and yours has been compressed with pain and suffering. So even though you may be young in age you are old because of the experiences, the exposures that all of us have gone through at the hands of Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his acolytes in Zanu PF,” said Biti, a lawyer by training.

“We have been beaten up, we have been tortured, we have been raped, we have been killed they have called us names — dogs, puppets of the west, you name it. I think the only thing we have not yet been accused of is incest.

“Each one of us knows someone killed by Zanu PF. We are not normal. You, we, are candidates for psychiatric treatment. Because we have been traumatised by Zanu PF and Robert Mugabe. We pretend to be normal but this is a society that functions on the culture of impunity.

“If you look in the eyes of Zanu PF, and I sit with Mugabe often, they have the glassy eyes of a dead person.

“We grew up in a nice Christian background, we are very spiritual, so we don’t need the Bible to tell us it is wrong to kill or rape. We are an unbelievable society for the kinds of things we tolerate.

“All my life I have known only one leader, Mugabe. It’s been a long road and people are tired now.”

An evicted white farmer among the audience asked Biti what he would do about compensation. “We did a rough estimate and your properties should be worth about US$3bn (R21 billion), but we can’t pay that although there must be compensation.”

He said the debt to white farmers for their homes, businesses, equipment etc. would best be solved by becoming part of sovereign debt to be settled one day and he jeered at continuing land invasions 11 years after they began and references made by Zanu PF to “new” famers so long after they took the land.

“So,” Biti said with his land-mark giggle, or perhaps it was a snigger, “we have ‘new’ farmers who are 87-years-old” alluding to a clutch of at least four prime farms 60km north west of Harare which Mugabe helped himself to and which were, for years, secretly funded by taxpayers’ money.

He said that the journey to democracy in Zimbabwe was not over. “We are down to the last two stages of the struggle: to ensure power transfer (after the next elections) and to protect the vote.”

Days before Biti’s marathon report back to his supporters in a corner of Harare, Industry Minister Welshman Ncube drove to Bulawayo to address a meeting designed to boost the city’s collapsed productive sectors.

Even mega rich and controversial Mines Minister Obert Mpofu, who addressed the meeting, saying nothing much, failed to attract punters. So the meeting was cancelled after lunch while Ncube was en route from Harare. Bankrupt Air Zimbabwe was grounded.

Ncube, the MDC’s founding secretary-general and a top lawyer before politics overtook his career, at the bar spoke about the largest single foreign investment into Zimbabwe since independence 31 years ago.

He persuaded Mugabe, the “glassy-eyed” final arbiter to accept an Indian bid above a Chinese offer for Ziscosteel.

Ncube, who says elections can only be held in 2013 if Zimbabwe stays within the SADC time lines for reform, came under enormous scrutiny setting up the deal. His landlines and mobile phones were bugged, so was his Harare home and for months he was impossible to find as be worked through the mechanics to get the Essar/ZISCO deal on the road.

“Mugabe preferred the Chinese. That’s his policy. Eventually he met with Essar executives privately and then said ok.”

Without Biti, Energy Minister Elton Mangoma or the MDC’s Health and Education ministers, Ncube and perhaps one or two Zanu PF ministers who want to rebuild the country they wrecked, Zimbabwe would have disintegrated even further.

VOA

By Sithandekile Mhlanga in Washington

27 September 2011

Education Minister Coltart called the meeting after union leaders blamed him for maintaining a policy that produced inequality among teachers as those in rural areas do not receive incentives, and some parents can’t afford them

Coltart said he hoped the stakeholders meeting on incentives will make recommendations that his ministry can integrate into its policies

Zimbabwean Education Minister David Coltart met Tuesday with teachers union leaders to discuss incentives paid to teachers by parents and local school associations to top off very low salaries, concluding that such a payments system is not sustainable.

Coltart and the unions did not agreed to end such incentives, but agreed that a meeting involving parents, students and teachers should be held next month on the issue. Some teachers recently staged informal work stoppages to protest reduced incentives.

Coltart called the crisis meeting after union leaders blamed him for maintaining a policy that had produced inequality and dissatisfaction among teachers as those in rural areas do not receive such payments, some urban parents cannot afford to make them.

Teachers in urban schools receive between $150 and $400 in incentives depending on their schools, plus a monthly salary of more than $300 from the government.

Zimbabwe Teachers Association Chief Executive Sifiso Ndlovu said the meeting coming up is likely to propose re-introducing rural allowances to equalize salaries, cut back on incentives, or urge the government to increase teacher salaries across the board.

Education Minister Coltart said his ministry agrees with the unions, but said incentives should not be scrapped until another solution to low salaries in place. Otherwise, said the minister, the quality of public education could be compromised.

Coltart said he hoped the stakeholders meeting on incentives will make recommendations that his ministry can integrate into its national education policies.

Newsday

By Tangai Chipangura

27 September 2011

After exactly 28 years, I returned to my old school, Gokomere High School, last week. As I left the Harare-Masvingo Highway, driving up the gravel road to the school, the familiarity of the scenery gripped me so strongly it felt eerily like the clock had wound back 20 years.

The old football pitch which greets you as you break out of the dusty farm road from the highway, the classroom blocks to your right, the dining hall at the opposite side, the junior boarding hostels next to it, the Grotto — still standing majestically right ahead — and that imposing structure housing the headmaster’s office bearing the bold inscription of the proud and powerful school motto: “Vincere Caritate/ Conquer with Love” — all brought memories flooding back to the best days of my life.

There are, of course, new structures planted all around the school — evidence of growth and development — but it is one such new structure that struck me dumb, and has continued to haunt me since that visit.

I saw pupils streaming in and out of pit latrines! I could not believe my eyes but true, there, right in front of me, boys — my age 30 years ago — were using the long drop toilet at Gokomere High School.

The headmaster later told me pit toilets had been put up at all students’ hostels way back in the early 2000s when water supply systems “collapsed”. But how could this have ever happened? How could one of the country’s best schools have gone through such regression?

Blair toilets would have perhaps been better. They are a hygienic revolutionary design for a long-drop toilet, odourless, very clean and free of flies. A pit toilet is taking things too far in this age!

If it was a desperate stopgap measure, then it should be that — a stopgap measure!

The headmaster said water runs from the taps only three times a day — one hour in the morning, one hour in the afternoon and one hour in the evening.

Those are the only times that students are allowed to use running-water ablutions. After the hour, all toilets are closed and it is back to the pit latrine!

The cause for this desperate situation is as painful as is the sight of boys and girls running to relieve themselves (supposedly even at night) in the long blocks of toilets at a school like Gokomere.

When Zimbabwe plunged into politically-driven economic chaos in 2002 and the rule of law ceased to exist, the school’s water pumps, scattered around the mission farm, were stripped and stolen. The situation was aggravated by the drought that ravaged the country that year.

Authorities had no option but to dig pit latrines, otherwise the school would have inevitably shut down. So the pit toilets came as an emergency measure to keep the school running, but let’s face it, the long drop is just not the thing at a boarding high school.

What must be avoided is perpetuation of a situation wrought upon the school by a once-upon-a-time national crisis.

School authorities — the church and administrators of the school — are doing the best they can to keep Gokomere on the country’s charts of academic excellence, but a lot needs to be done to restore the dignity of the school.

The object of my visit to Gokomere last week was a meeting of the school’s old students. There are concerted efforts to put together a Gokomere High Old Students’ Association (GHOSA). The determination displayed by members to bring change to the school provides a much-needed lift to the spirit.

Gokomere has churned out thousands of professional big brains — doctors, lawyers, engineers, business executives, bankers, teachers, farmers, politicians; you name it — people capable of returning the school to its former glory.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is a product of Gokomere, like are countless other political luminaries who occupy high offices in the land. They are expected, as are all ex-students of this great school, to plough back to the institution that made them what they are.

School authorities have warmed up to the idea of former students rekindling the fire and it now rests with individual ex-students to take up the challenge — to at least bring back water to the school and pull down the pit latrines.

In various schools across the country, infrastructure has deteriorated to unprecedented levels, forcing many children to learn in the open.

The restoration of the education system in Zimbabwe will require the adoption of cost-efficient and effective strategies by government, communities and partners, with the ultimate aim to rebuild schools to standards that ideally match or surpass those of the pre-2000 era.

Upon assumption of office two years ago, Education minister David Coltart suggested the establishment of Academies of Excellence — institutions that would be established within a framework of immediate recovery imperatives.

Whatever became of this brilliant idea, we may never know, but the fact remains that Zimbabwe’s education pride hangs precariously on the precipice if schools like Gokomere are allowed to plummet to Upper-Top standards — even toilet-wise.

tchipangura@newsday.co.zw

Newsday

Comment

26 September 2011

Zimbabwe’s teachers are among the least paid workers in the country and have, for years, fought losing battles for reconsideration and restoration of dignity to their profession.

They earn around $300 per month, minus incentives – paid by parents and these benefit mostly teachers in urban areas.

It is not only criminal but also grossly immoral for anyone to then seek to fleece the teachers through dubious membership fees, sometimes forced on the poor educators by unions which do not feel obliged to justify their existence.

That the three teachers’ unions could be stealing as much as $7,6 million from teachers every year is shocking.

The Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association (Zimta) collects $10 every month from about 44 000 teachers. The Progressive Teachers’ Union (PTUZ) collects $8 from a total of about 15 000 teachers while the Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (TUZ) also deducts $8 from each of its 10 000 members.

This has been going on for years and teachers have not questioned this because it apparently has not occurred to them that while individually, the $8 or $10 may appear insignificant, the collective loot is colossal and they are paying it for nothing.

It is pleasing that this matter is one of the few that minister David Coltart and his deputy Lazarus Dokora have found common ground and are determined to collectively dig out and expose the worm.

What is disturbing is that in some cases, teachers do not volunteer to become members of these unions. They only discover they belong to one union or the other when they get their payslips.

One wonders if the objective of these unions is really to serve the teachers’ interests because if that were the case, the teachers would not have been wallowing in poverty for so many years.The money that the unions collect – nearly $7 million per year – could have been used very effectively to fight the employer, in court even, for better working conditions of members.

The fact that the country now has three teachers’ unions is also indicative of the monetary drive that has led to union leaders fighting for the cake and eventually splitting to form rival unions.

It is not to do with workers’ representation. It is all about money and now that a probe has been set, the cat may finally come out of the bag.

Given the amount of money involved, it is crucial that the investigation is left as independent as possible from people that may be willing to have their hands greased to slip the case under the carpet.

Teachers must be on the forefront of this probe and they should be ready to press for action to be taken against anyone found to have stolen from them. It is good that a council has been set up by Cabinet to monitor the operations of these unions to prevent this daylight robbery.

Herald

By Felix Share

26 September 2011

EDUCATION, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister David Coltart will tomorrow hold a crisis meeting with the three teachers’  unions to strike a “common ground” over the payment of incentives.

Confirming the meeting yesterday, the minister dismissed claims by teachers’ unions that the incentive scheme was not a Public Service Commission policy, but came as a result of his “insistence”.

He said the policy was already in existence before he took office in February 2009.

“I am meeting them (unions) Tuesday afternoon as there has been a lot of debate in the media,” he said.

“I have to get their views because I have no problem ending the incentives overnight, but I cannot just terminate them without an agreement.

“If they tell me formally that they do not want them (incentives), then they will have to assist me in policing the teachers lest we criminalise the education sector.”

Minister Coltart shifted the blame to his predecessors, saying they were the ones who introduced incentives.

“When I took office in 2009, the policy was already there and there was a circular from the permanent secretary (Mr Stephen Mahere) that had legalised everything,” he said.

“I only continued with the policy and structured it to ensure implementation equitability so that it would be implemented. It is my desire to end them quickly, but a common ground has to be found.”

Teachers’ unions last week blamed Minister Coltart for the incentives, saying it was a “serious miscalculation” while others said the policy was “poorly crafted” in terms of sustainability.

This comes as teachers in some parts of the country are striking against school authorities’ decision to slash the incentives.

In Harare, teachers at Rugare Primary School went on strike last Wednesday after authorities slashed incentives by US$30.

Teachers at Prince Edward High School also downed tools last Friday protesting against, among other things, a decision to reduce their incentives from US$300 to about US$50.

The unions were against the payment of the incentives from the start, arguing that the long-term solution was to increase salaries and improve conditions of service.

Government increased salaries and allowances for its workers in July this year, resulting in teachers earning an average of US$300.

But it has been difficult for Minister Coltart to effect the scrapping of the incentives after the salary increment.

Instead, disputes between teachers and school authorities have erupted at most schools in Harare and Bulawayo over the incentives.

• If all our players had the lion heart of Tatenda Taibu we would be world beaters – took us within a whisker of beating Pakistan today #
• Methinks that Jonathan Moyo doth protest too much – about Wikileaks that is…what is said is said; what is done is done- just live with it #
• In Windhoek Namibia attending SADC Education Ministers conference – always amazes me how the German influence here was so profound – tidy! #
• University of Cape Town / Newsroom & publications / Daily news http://t.co/byNoU6sX via @AddToAny Dean's merit list includes Douglas Coltart #
• I am very distressed by the execution of Troy Davis – death penalty should never be imposed if there is any doubt whatsoever #

The Sunday Independent, South Africa

By Peta Thornycroft

25 September 2011

When Tendai Biti quipped that he was finance minister without any “finance”, his audience in a church hall in Harare smiled knowingly.

They knew that when Biti went into the treasury for the first time as finance minister in 2009, he found his Zanu-PF predecessor had left him little more than petty cash to run the country and about R50 billion in foreign debt.

In the audience, labourers, clerks, domestic workers, vendors, activists, artisans, a handful of mostly middle-aged shabby whites and many unemployed people understood Biti’s joke because they too were demolished by hyper-inflation, the trademark of Zanu-PF’s mismanagement prior to the unity government with the MDC.

Like Biti, ordinary Zimbabweans have no “finance”.

Biti was reporting back to his constituency last week. For months beforehand he had been unable to get police permission to hold the meeting. So he went ahead anyway but without advance publicity. The audience was quite small, more intimate town hall conversation than grandstand report-back.

He described for the first time some of the hazards of being in a government with Zanu-PF, why he and cabinet colleagues found it so difficult to get the country moving again.

Biti told the meeting his party, the main MDC faction, “saved” Zimbabwe by going into the inclusive government with Zanu-PF which it had defeated in elections a year earlier.

He told his constituents that during negotiations, he had opposed MDC joining an inclusive government. But he added that now, 31 months later, he believed it had been the right decision because it gave Zimbabweans “time out, time out (to recover from Zanu-PF violence) as we were being scorched.”

Biti said the MDC now understood “the levers of power in government. And now we know the myths too.”

The levers of power Biti says are not held by policymakers such as he but by the bureaucrats.

It is public knowledge these days that Zanu-PF ministers nod off during Tuesday morning’s cabinet meetings and spend only a few hours per week attending to ministry business.

The rest of the time they are either working for Zanu-PF or attending to the formerly white-owned farms they have been given since 2000.

The permanent secretaries (equivalent to South Africa’s director-general) are in jobs-for-life and are as important to Zanu-PF’s political survival as the security forces.

He said these bureaucrats “keep you busy without being busy”, Biti said. Many insiders in government say that Biti’s own permanent secretary is particularly obstructive.

Mugabe has mostly ignored his commitments to joint decision-making with the MDC under the three-year-old multi party political agreement he signed in 2008, and has unilaterally appointed most top civil servants.

Biti surprised some when he said that it no longer mattered to him that Zanu-PF controlled the security ministries.

“I learnt that the secret of good governance is not constitutions, it’s not about the army or the police, it is about love and caring. It is better to run the social ministries.

“It is better to be in charge of health and education than the police.

“We had a vision to democratise our country when the MDC was formed in 1999. We wanted to put an end to 20 years of cruelty, 20 years of theft, of fear, and this has been a long and tortuous road.”

And it is not over yet and the struggle goes on each day, often within the ministries.

David Coltart, education minister in the other, much smaller, MDC, is regularly obstructed by his permanent secretary.

It’s hard to imagine, though, that either Biti or Coltart have it as bad as one key MDC minister – who did not want to be identified for safety reasons – who has more or less given up trying to reform public service employees within the ministry and who is openly defied by the ministry’s permanent secretary.

“He seems my number on his mobile and hits the off button. If I go to his office he comes forward and pushes me back and closes the door in my face.

“So when I am desperate to communicate with him, I try to go to a social event where I know he will be and try to talk to him there, where in front of others he cannot be so rude to me. I don’t think I can make any progress while he remains.”

Biti said: “I turned 45 three or so weeks ago but I feel I am 87 years of age.” That prompted quiet titters from the crowd because, of course, everyone in the hall knows that President Robert Mugabe is 87.

“My life and yours have been compressed with pain and suffering. So even though you may be young in age you are old because of the experiences, the exposures that all of us have gone through at the hands of Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his acolytes in Zanu-PF

“We have been beaten up, we have been tortured, we have been raped, we have been killed.

“They have called us names, dogs, puppets of the West, you name it. I think the only thing we have not yet been accused of is incest.

“Each one of us knows someone killed by Zanu-PF.

“We are not normal. You, we, are candidates for psychiatric treatment. Because we have been traumatised by Zanu-PF and Robert Mugabe. We pretend to be normal but this is a society that functions on the culture of impunity.

“If you look in the eyes of Zanu-PF, and I sit with Mugabe often, they have the glassy eyes of a dead person. We grew up in a nice Christian background, we are very spiritual, we don’t need the Bible to tell us it is wrong to kill or rape.

“We are an unbelievable society for the kinds of things we tolerate.

“All my life I have known only one leader, Mugabe. It’s been a long road and people are tired now.”

An evicted white farmer in the audience asked Biti what he would do about compensating the farmers for the loss of their farms.

“We did a rough estimate and your properties should be worth about $3bn (R21bn) but we can’t pay that. But there must be compensation.

He said the debt to white farmers for their homes, businesses, equipment etc would best be solved by becoming part of sovereign debt to be settled one day and jeered at continuing land invasions 11 years after they began and references made by Zanu-PF to “new” farmers years after they took the land.

“So,” Biti said with his landmark giggle, or perhaps it was a snigger, “we have ‘new’ farmers who are 87 years old” alluding to a clutch of at least four prime farms 60km north west of Harare which Mugabe helped himself to and which were, for years, secretly funded by taxpayers’ money.

He said that the journey to democracy in Zimbabwe was not over.

“We are down to the last two stages of the struggle: to ensure power transfer (after the next elections) and to protect the vote,” he said.

Biti, Industry Minister Welshman Ncube from the smaller MDC – who has just persuaded the Indian iron and steel giant Esser to buy the derelict Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company (Zisco) – energy minister Elton Mangoma, the MDC’s health and education ministers and perhaps one or two Zanu-PF ministers who now want to rebuild the country they wrecked, have indeed saved Zimbabwe. The country is just hanging together. Without them it would have completely fallen apart.

Sunday Mail

By Itai Mazire

25 September 2011

THE Government has launched investigations into the operations and financial affairs of the country’s  three main teachers’ unions following allegations of misappropriation of US$7,6 million collected from teachers in membership fees annually.

Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister David Coltart last week confirmed the launch of the probe, saying Cabinet had set up the Professional Teachers’ Council (PTC) that would, among other things, monitor operations of teachers’ unions.

Minister Coltart said while there were laws which governed unions, it became a cause for concern when people’s hard- earned money was being abused.

The three major teacher unions at the centre of the investigations are the Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association (Zimta), the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) and the Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (TUZ), which are collectively raking in US$640 000 every month in membership fees.

Said Minister Coltart: “Cabinet has agreed on the formation of PTC……..It is unfair for people to take away money from the already suffering teachers. Every teacher is struggling to make ends meet and that is why there should be statutory instruments that protect these professionals (teachers).” Minister Coltart said it was also illegal for unions to continue deducting money from teachers who had ceased to be their members.

“Members are not obliged to join these unions and every member has got a right to terminate their membership.

“It is illegal for someone to continue deducting money from a member without his or her consent,” he said.

Minister Coltart expressed the need for Government to provide teachers with legal education to save them from being fleeced. Zimta collects U$440 000 per month, while the TUZ and PTUZ pocket US$80 000 and US$120 000 respectively. When teachers’ salaries were increased by 50 percent recently, their monthly subscriptions went up by between 60 and 100 percent. Each Zimta member pays US$10 per month, while TUZ — which has close to 10 000 members — collects US$8 subscription fees from each member. PTUZ has around 15 000 members and collects US$8 from each member. Teachers have since accused the unions of failing to press for salaries above the poverty datum line of US$502 per month, yet they were quick to inflate subscription fees.

The teachers also accused the unions of not giving them value for their money. In the past, subscriptions were used to cover legal representation, funeral expenses and soft loans. However, these services have stopped at some of the unions. Teachers are now taking home an average of US$300 per month, though some get more through incentives paid by parents.

The union leaders are accused of granting themselves high monthly allowances without the approval of their constituents. The teacher unions’ leadership, however, insist they were still offering quality services to their members and that no money was being misused. Education Deputy Minister Cde Lazarus Dokora warned teacher unions to be professional, saying that they should stick to laws that govern their operations as organisations.

Herald

23 September 2011

THE introduction of incentives for teachers was a “serious miscalculation” by Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister, David Coltart, teachers’ unions have said.

Unions officials yesterday said the incentives were not a Public Service Commission policy, but came as a result of Minister Coltart’s “insistence”.

This comes as teachers in some parts of the country are striking against school authorities’ decision to slash incentives paid by parents.

The unions were against the payment of the incentives from the start, arguing that the long term solution was to increase salaries and improve conditions of service.

In Harare, teachers at Rugare Primary School went on strike on Wednesday after authorities slashed the incentives by US$30.

Teachers at Prince Edward High School also downed tools last Friday protesting against, among other things, a decision to reduce their incentives from US$300 to about US$50.

Senior officials in the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture said Minister Coltart, who had been promised funding by donors, was now bearing the fruits of his “flawed policy”.

Zimbabwe Teachers Association of Zimbabwe chief executive, Mr Sifiso Ndlovu, said Minister Coltart’s policy was “the worst” since independence.

He said the policy was “poorly crafted” in terms of sustainability.

“It’s the Minister who came up with his own policy not the employer (PSC),” he said.

“But this worst policy to ever exist in our country has caused disorder in the education sector.

“It was a divisional tactic, whereby they knew teachers would never speak with one voice on the issue of salaries, but it is now backfiring on him.

“In his process of arresting labour discontentment, the minister has shot himself in the foot.

“He has shifted the employment responsibility to parents, a situation which has never happened in this country.”

Mr Ndlovu said the problem would be solved if Government standardised condition of service for workers.

Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe secretary general, Mr Raymond Majongwe, said Minister Coltart’s miscalculation was “plunging” the education sector into crisis.

“This was a lack of a political tact by him (Minister Coltart) and the chickens have come to roost as a result of flawed planning,” he said.

“We told him from the beginning that it would be a disaster.

“Even when Zanu-PF was struggling economically, it did not come up with such disastrous policies.”

Mr Majongwe said Minister Coltart should call for an all stakeholders meeting as schools were now “war zones” because of the issue of incentives.

Teachers Union of Zimbabwe chief executive, Mr Manuel Nyawo, said Minister Coltart had brought “mayhem” to the education sector.

“This policy is problematic because it does not apply to all teachers,” he said.

“It is now difficult to stop the incentives and the minister, being the master planner, should be able to deal with that.

“But as far as we are concerned there, is no exit strategy for the minister.”

Senior officials in Minister Coltart’s office said the donor funding he had been promised failed to materialise.

“He thought it would be for a short time since he, together with his party, had been promised a lot of cash, but nothing came forward,” said one official.

“Now, he is failing to find solutions to problems he created.”

Efforts to get a comment from Minister Coltart were fruitless as he was away in Namibia.

But he is on record recently defending the payment of incentives, saying scrapping them would cause chaos.

He said the incentives should be removed after teachers’ salaries were improved.

Government increased salaries and allowances for its workers in July this year, resulting in teachers earning an average of US$300.

But it has been difficult for Minister Coltart to effect the scrapping of the incentives after the salary increment.

Instead, disputes between teachers and school authorities have erupted at most schools in Harare and Bulawayo once a notice is circulated that the incentives would be slashed.

VOA

 22 September 2011

By Violet Gonda

Education Minister David Coltart had encouraged parents to make incentive payments to teachers at a time when the system was still recovering from a deep crisis during the tumultuous 2008 election year.

“I am not going to support a teacher who finds himself fighting the parent because if he fights the parent that means he is no longer fighting the real employer (government) to get better salaries.”

Many Zimbabwean teachers and parents of students are at odds over the reduction of supplementary payments or incentives by the School Development Association, which said it reduced the payments following an increase in state teacher salaries.

Education Minister David Coltart had encouraged parents to make incentive payments to teachers at a time when the system was still recovering from a deep crisis.

The state-run Herald newspaper said teachers at Prince Edward High School walked out this week to protest the reduction of incentives from US$300 to about US$50. Sources said teachers at  Kuwadzana 6 Primary School saw theirs cut to $150 from $200.

Surprisingly, one of the country’s main teachers unions opposes the incentive system.

Zimbabwe Teachers Association Chief Executive Sifiso Ndlovu told VOA reporter Violet Gonda that incentives are divisive. He said teachers are misdirecting their anger.

He said: “In as far as it concerns the development of education it is a policy that you cannot sustain for a long time and is likely to cause this confusion.”

“I am not going to support a teacher who finds himself fighting the parent because if he fights the parent that means he is no longer fighting the real employer (the government) to get better salaries,” Ndlovu said.

Parent Kurauone Chihwayi said he and others were happy to pay the incentives to keep teachers in classrooms and motivate them – but said the program is unsustainable.

He said some teachers are now demanding additional fees on top of the incentives.

Others charged that the incentive system has diverted the attention of teachers so that they give short shrift to pupils regular classes and allocate more time to tutoring.