Hansard Volume 37:29
Parliamentary Question time
6 April 2011
PARLIAMENT OF ZIMBABWE
Wednesday, 6th April 2011
The House of Assembly met at a Quarter-past Two o’clock p.m.
PRAYERS
(THE DEPUTY SPEAKER in the Chair)
ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE DEPUTY SPEAKER
CHANGES TO PORTFOLIO COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP
THE DEPUTY SPEAKER: I have to inform the House of changes in the membership of Committees where Hon. T. Sansole Tose Wesley has moved from the Portfolio Committee on Industry and Commerce to the Portfolio Committee on Small and Medium Enterprises Cooperation Development. He will also serve on the Public Accounts Committee as a second Committee.
SWITCHING OFF OF CELLPHONES
THE DEPUTY SPEAKER: I have to remind hon. members to switch off their cellphones before business commences as the cellphones may interfere with the digital audio recording equipment.
ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
MR. CROSS: Madam Speaker, I would like to ask the Deputy Prime Minister this afternoon if he would give us some idea of what Government policy is towards the exhumation of bodies in the Mt Darwin area that is currently underway. The normal understanding is that the court should order such exhumation and that it should be supervised by forensic pathologists to determine how the person died, their identities and so forth. In addition to that ….
THE DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order hon. member, please just ask your question.
MR. CROSS: I would like to ask the Deputy Prime Minister to spell out what Government policy is towards the exhumation of bodies in the Mt Darwin area that is currently underway?
THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER (PROF. MUTAMBARA): Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for that question and I want to say to this august House that all the concerns that have been raised are very important to Government and that whatever we do to Mt Darwin or anywhere in the country must be in keeping with our laws. As you are aware, the Ministry of Home Affairs has now officially taken over the process of exhumation that is currently taking place in Mt Darwin and in that process, the Ministry of Home Affairs should be able to address the concerns that the hon. member has raised. It is important that as a country, we come to terms with our history and also respect the contributions made by all Zimbabweans to create a new dispensation in the country. The concerns raised by the hon. member are being addressed by the ministry and the ministry should be in a position to make a substantive statement on that matter. I want to thank the hon. member for that question.
MR. BHASIKITI: My question is directed to the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture. I want to know from the minister why there is a new trend on development which is to reduce the level and quality of education in schools by just buying textbooks from one publisher whose publication is not favourable to the schools as was the case in the UNICEF tender and taking away the booksellers out of the system.
THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, SPORT, ARTS AND CULTURE (SENATOR COLTART): I am grateful that the hon. member has raised this question and I crave your indulgence to give a very full reply to the question because there has been a lot of misinformation regarding this issue. When the transitional government started in February 2009, there was crisis in the education sector. Eighty thousand schools were closed and ninety thousand teachers were on strike. The position regarding textbooks in all our schools can only be described as a catastrophe. The average textbook/pupil ratio in the vast majority of our schools was as bad as 15 pupils to 1 textbook. Madam Speaker, you will have to appreciate that if 15 pupils have to share 1 textbook, there is no conducive environment to learning and in that scenario we have seen a decline of pass rates, in particular, in primary schools in Grade 7. The grade 7 pass rate used to be as high as 70% and we have seen it decreasing in the last 4 to 5 years and it was especially acute in rural areas.
I hope hon. members would listen because this involves all our children. The concern of children’s pass rate should be a concern to all of us irrespective of background or political affiliation. Educationists advise that one of the most important areas that we have to address in 2009 was the issue of providing textbooks, especially to primary school children. Madam Speaker, you understand in educational perspective that primary school is the most important part in any child’s scholastic career for the first four to five years of their education, it is those years that they learn the basic literacy and numeracy skills and if they do not have access to textbooks during that time, their education is affected and that is why we advise that we have to focus on primary schools. Madam Speaker, you will recall that in September 2009, I established the Educational Transitional Fund with UNICEF. As you know, it is a United Nations organisation and we then set about seeking to raise sufficient money to address the initial target of mainly the provisions of primary school textbooks.  Soon after that, we managed to raise 52 million dollars for this purpose, that is another issue.  Soon after the education transmission fund was established in September 2009, UNICEF and I managed to speak to the entire publishing industry and to the book sellers to explain that this was a national emergency, we needed the books as a matter of emergency.  We explained to them that we have relatively limited resources but we wanted to purchase books so that we will have a ratio of one is to one (1:1). Every child should have his or her own textbook in particular subjects.
We explained that because of this national emergency, we do not want any publishing house or printing house to enjoy windfall profits, we wanted them to have economies of scales. We wanted the publishing houses to reduce the profit margins in the interest of children.
There are three main publishing houses in this country Madam Speaker, that is Longman, ZBH and College Print. We called a meeting with the three publishing houses and I regret that at the conclusion of those initial series of meetings which was done in the last quarter of 2009, that there was an informal cartel of operating involving these houses because when we asked for prices, at Longman, we were given prices that were comparable to other booksellers. The pricing we had arrived on was going to print thousands of books rather than millions of books.   So, we were unable to enter into a contract with the publishers because the prices were so high. The prices that had been suggested at that time were ranging between US$4 and US$5 dollars per textbook. We had done some research internationally to find out the actual costs of producing a textbook and we realised that it cost US$1 to produce a textbook.
But because we could not reach an agreement with the publishers, a decision was taken by the ministry to hand over to UNICEF the process of producing text books and UNICEF then decided to go to tender. The tender process begun in December 2009. It was conducted entirely by UNICEF, not by the Ministry of Education.
Madam Speaker, that culminated the first quarter 2010. At the conclusion of the tender, UNICEF made a decision based on financial consideration to award the tender to the publishing house which had submitted the cheapest price. Madam Speaker, I need to stress that the difference in price was substantial. The difference in price between Longman and the other two publishing houses went into hundreds and thousands US dollars. When the contract was awarded, there was a saving of US$10 million. That has resulted in production and delivery of some 30 million textbooks to every single child in our country.   Every single primary school child has his or her own English, Maths, indigenous language and environmental sciences text book.
Madam Speaker, we now have the best text-books in Africa. Let me now address the hon. member’s question. The hon. member obviously has not seen the Grade 7 results which, for the first time in seven years, have improved. Madam Speaker, we are now moving to the secondary school text books. It is not good to rely on one publishing house. We want to conduct a survey in all our secondary schools so that we know the correct number of text books required. When it comes to secondary distribution of textbooks, there will be equitable distribution of books to all publishing houses.
To conclude Madam Speaker, because of the urgency of the primary school textbook programme and because of the need to save money, a decision was taken between the ministry and UNICEF that UNICEF will contract to deliver these textbooks direct to schools. We had several warehouses in Harare, we stored some 13 million text books and these text books had to be delivered to some 500 000 primary schools. The cheapest way of getting those text books to primary schools was by having a centralised position.
MR BHASIKITI: The Hon. Minister has evaded the greater part of my  question. The issue was on less preferred textbooks by schools, which means schools do not prefer using those textbooks which were given to them and that question is not answered by the minister.
The second part is, education is a question of the curriculum. The textbooks, when we deal with textbooks, it is not a question of price because the less price, the textbooks are the less preferred by schools and they will not be addressing the curriculum or the syllabus but that was what the Hon. Minister was saying they considered and then they poured into schools. So, I wanted that clarity on why they made deliberate efforts like that when the system agreed by the ministry for supply of textbooks is through book sellers so that the schools present their orders to booksellers then suppliers take from publishers and give to schools what they require and this was not observed.
The minister should give explanation on that because he is on tender with the booksellers?
SENATOR COLTART: Madam Speaker, I was not aware that the hon. member was hard of hearing, so I will repeat because I addressed all of these issues in my substantive remarks in the beginning.
He says that there are less preferred textbooks. I was not aware that the hon. member was an educationist himself. If he goes to schools throughout the country, he will find the joy that is in virtually all our schools that they have textbooks. Most of the schools did not even have any textbook. So to say that these books are less preferred, in fact non other than His Excellency the President when this was raised in Cabinet, when he heard that Longmans was the company that had been fairly contracted, he expressed his satisfaction regarding that because Longmans has been involved in education in this country for decades. All of the books that were produced in the primary school textbooks programme have been approved by the Curriculum Development Unit and have been used by schools throughout the country for the last three decades.
So, with respect to the hon. member in this regard, he does not know what he is talking about.
Secondly, the hon. member said this is not a question of price. Let me just illustrate once again the dramatic reduction in the price that we achieved through this process. You will recall in my substantive remarks that the average cost of a textbook was between US$4 and US$5. As a result of the tender, the commercially competitive tender prices run buy UNICEF and not run by the Ministry of Education, the average cost of textbooks was reduced from US$5 to US70 cents. That resulted in a total saving of US$10 million, which in turn enabled us to achieve ratios that we did not think possible at the commencement of this exercise, namely a one to one ratio.
This exercise has been hailed internationally as one of the most successful textbook procurement exercises ever.
Madam Speaker, let me make one final point, the hon. member raised the question again why booksellers had not been involved and the reason for this was that this is a national emergency. Children did not have textbooks and for every year that they did not have textbooks, we faced the prospect of a lost generation which is not in anybody’s interest. The only way that we could achieve these ratios was by doing an emergency operation. Had we gone through booksellers, every person would have had their cut and inevitably the price of the exercise would have rocketed and we would not have achieved the ratios that we have.
What I explained very clearly to the hon. member is that, when it comes to the secondary school programme which is not as urgent as the primary school programme, we will endeavor to involve the textbook proprietors countrywide in the distribution exercise so that they are not prejudiced.
MR. NEZI: Will the Hon. Minister please clarify, the publishers who won the tender, they do not know how they won the tender and the other two publishers who lost the tender, they do not know how they lost the tender. What criteria was being used because the norm is that, when one loses or one wins, it has to be made public.
SENATOR COLTART: There were three main criteria that had to be met. The first was that the books tendered had to be approved textbooks by the Ministry of Education Curriculum Development Unit.
The second main criteria was of course price. The third criteria was the quality of production. It is no use getting the cheapest textbook if it falls apart and UNICEF published in our newspapers. There is nothing hidden about this. It was a public tender, published advertisements and these criteria were clearly set out. Longmans came up with a tender of books that had been approved by the ministry.
As I explained very carefully in my last remarks, they came up with the cheapest tender offer and not by a small margin, but the tender was cheaper by several hundred thousand dollars against one of the other publishers and several million dollars against the third publisher. I am not going to name them at this stage but suffice to say that these documents are clear.
The third issue was on quality of the books produced by Longmans, and the proof is in the eating. The books that have been supplied by Longmans are of the highest possible quality that they are not going to fall apart in a matter of weeks or months and the feedback that we are getting from headmasters and teachers confirm that. So for any publishing house to claim that they were done out of a deal, they simply ignored the objective fact of reality of a commercial tender that went to the company that produced the cheapest cost for the best quality which had been asked for.
We can get a lot of foul crying from publishing houses because yes, they did not get when they tried to make out windfall profits but UNICEF is simply not prepared to allow that to happen in the interests of Zimbabwean children.
MR. NEZI: My question is that the publisher who won the tender does not know how they won the tender. The other publishers do not know how they lost the tender. Can I please have clarity on that?
SENATOR COLTART: Madam Speaker, with respect to the hon. member, he assumes that I am a director of ZPH Quality for Longmans, he must put that question to them. I told him exactly the objective criteria on which this tender was based and what UNICEF advised us as a ministry, how they awarded the tender. It is up to him to ask the company not the Minister of Education. They know the answer.
MR. MAZIKANA: Thank you Madam Speaker. I direct my question to the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture. While the children, teachers and headmasters are celebrating this great achievement, if you go as far as Kanyemba the furthest northern school in our country, the books have reached there. What is the ministry doing to improve the mobility of District Education Officers and Regional Education Directors?
SENATOR COLTART: Madam Speaker, I am glad that the hon. member has raised this question. One of the achievements of the Transitional Government involving all three parties in the last six months has been to allocate resources for this purpose. Cabinet, on the 7th of September 2010, unanimously agreed on a short-term strategic plan for education and the fourth point in that strategic plan approved by Cabinet was to address Government’s issues within the ministry. One of the problems that we faced in the ministry Madam Speaker, is that all the posts of District Education Officers who are the ministry’s policemen have not been filled and even whether they are filled, many of them did not have access to what he is trying to put across. To address that towards the end of last year, Government allocated US$1.3 million to the ministry to purchase vehicles. We went through the Government tender process and a contract has been awarded to a company in Zimbabwe which is in the process of supplying in excess of 50 vehicles to the ministry and we are in the process of distributing those to District Education Offices countrywide. I hope, through the provision of vehicles and also by getting our establishment process fully taken up, that we may be able to address the concern which is a real concern raised by the hon. member.
MR. MUDARIKWA: My question to the Hon. Minister of Education ,
Sports, Arts and Culture is; would it not be possible for the ministry to recommend that DEOs and Headmasters get duty free vehicles for the purpose of the development of our education? Thank you.
SENATOR COLTART: Madam Speaker, I do not think there is need. We have 73 administrative district offices for education countrywide and each district is meant to have a DEO. By the end of this year, every District Education Officer should have access to his or her own vehicle, but not a personal vehicle. It will be a ministry vehicle which is allocated to that District Education Officer. When that goal is achieved Madam Speaker, they will be mobile and there will not be any need for them to be allocated duty free vehicles on a personal basis.
*MR. MLAMBO: My question is directed to the Deputy Prime Minister, Prof. Mutambara as to what is government policy in connection with the Media Houses disseminating libelous and scandalous information regarding institutions such as SADC.
*THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER (PROF. MUTAMBARA): In response to the question asked, we are a Government of National Unity and as such, institutions such as the Parliament of Zimbabwe should also emulate the essence of unity as enshrined in the GNU. State Media Institutions both electronic and the print should disseminate information in support of the GNU. Consequently, media houses should try as much as possible to be patriotic and pro-Zimbabwe. Communications between governments or countries is implemented through specific government channels and not TVs and newspapers. When the Government of Zimbabwe wants to hold discussions with SADC institutions or the South African President Hon. J. Zuma, this will be done through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although we suggested that both print and electronic media should be patriotic fundamentally, Madam Speaker, the communication between governments is done government to government and as Government, we do not communicate foreign policy through the media. We will talk with our South African counterparts through the established channels I mentioned earlier. But when all is said and done, our media should be patriotic. I thank the hon. member for raising this question.
MR. MUDARIKWA: My question is directed to the Deputy Minister of Science and Technology. What is the national policy in relation to GMO and when are we going to see the production of GMO soya-beans because the chicken industry is now affected by not using GMO soya-beans. They cannot compete on the world market. Thank you.
THE MINISTER OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (PROF. DZINOTYIWEI): I would like to thank the hon. member Madam Speaker for the question. I think this is a second time the question has been raised in Parliament and I am pleased to have the opportunity of explaining once more. Generally, the position we have in the country is that any GMO products which are in seed form can only be imported with permission from our bio-technology authority and can only be imported with the intention of milling it and that milling should be done under supervision. Otherwise any other product that can be imported like mealie-meal must come in that milled form and not unmilled form, but like I indicated last time Madam Speaker, this is an item before us at Cabinet. It has different positions depending on the way the GMOs affect different sectors. For instance, we expected position to be given by Health, a position to be given by Agriculture, but I can assure the members that as far as we are concerned ourselves, from the science and technology side, we see absolutely no harm in the consumption of GMO and this is a position which has been verified all over. You have the WHO, you have FAO and all the academies of science in various nations, the food and drug administration in the USA, the Royal Society in UK. All academies of science as far as our way have confirmed that there is nothing to suggest that GMOs are unhealthy or could affect the environment and so from the scientific position, we see no harm in making use of those products but instead, we feel that it is actually useful to apply them because they enhance productivity, they tend to yield a much cheaper product to the farmer when you apply it. There are generally plenty of GMOs in the medical field. The bulk of modern medicines that are being discovered, even though some people do not realise it, are in fact GMO based and these are applied in hospitals. So, from a scientific position, we see no problem, but I would await the decision of Cabinet when all the other sectors have commented on the subject to see if we can have a unanimous position.
MR. NYAMUDEZA: I would like to find out from Mr. Nhema what he is doing to keep elephants and lions where they belong because in my constituency, elephants have been crossing Sabi river and lions are eating cattle.
THE MINISTER OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT (MR. NHEMA): I wish to acknowledge the question raised by the hon. member. As you are aware, Government has a policy of Camp Fire and this is a programme which Government found necessary in an effort to reduce the conflict between humans and wildlife. I must say the whole country is a wildlife country. We stand shoulder to shoulder with most countries in SADC because of wilderness and wildlife. Historically, you will realise that elephants travel very long distances from one end of the country to the other and they have a tendency to follow the same route traveled even 30 years earlier. Humans, on the other hand have tended to settle themselves in various areas and in some cases, in the animal corridor. The elephant has a tendency to use the same path and this is dependent on the situation on the ground such as drought or floods.
So, we encourage our community to understand the movement of these animals, hence the introduction of Camp Fire. It is very difficult to keep an animal like an elephant behind a fence. It only takes 20 of them to push the fence over and they will go away. So, yes it is a problem that we have but we are trying our best to educate the people and in some cases we do put electric fences, but I must add on to say that it is not adequate if the
movement is in excess of 20 elephants.
In terms of the lions, unfortunately over the years, we have lost most of our population and we are worried that as we go on killing these lions, we might have nothing left in the next       generations to come. So, again we are looking for a balance apart from educating our people and trying to keep those animals away from human beings so that they do not attack human beings and do not destroy crops. So, the policy is co-habitation and living in harmony with nature and wildlife.
MR. MAHLANGU: I direct my question to the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture. It is on record that ZANU PF sympathisers are going round in schools forcing school children from grade one to sign the sanctions petition Bill, thereby affecting the quality of education. What is the position of your Ministry on that?
THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, SPORTS, ARTS AND CULTURE (SENATOR COLTART): I have read press reports regarding this but I have not received any official reports coming into my ministry, so I cannot comment regarding any specific allegations. What I can comment on is our general policy which is a long standing policy within the ministry. The policy of the ministry is that schools should be apolitical zones. There should be no partisan politics taking place in schools, unless they are being taught history and debating politics but the policy is that there should be no partisan political discourse in the schools and certainly there should be no intimidation of teachers or children themselves. I would urge all hon. members to embrace this policy because it is in the best interest of our children that we keep our schools as havens of peace so that the children can learn in a trouble free environment which is in the children’s best interests. If these reports are correct, they are to be condemned. Children should not have their education interrupted in any way. We cannot control what happens beyond the boundaries of schools, but what happens within the schools is our concern as the Ministry of Education and such a thing should never take place within schools.
MR. GWIYO: I would like to find out from Mr. Nhema whether the dispute between his ministry and the Ministry of Home Affairs has been resolved with regard to the management of the National Parks. More importantly, because last year when we were at the budget workshop, there was a dispute with regards to the Victoria Falls area, has that been resolved?
MR. NHEMA: It is in the process of being resolved.
MR. GWIYO: Probably it would also benefit the House if the Minister was going to elaborate his view with regard to who should take responsibility of managing the National Parks and Victoria Falls.
THE MINISTER OF ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT (MR. NHEMA): Without going into detail, it is the prerogative of the presidency to decide which departments go under which ministry, so we await that resolution.
MR. JEMBERE: My question is directed to the Deputy Prime Minister. I think the issue of the Civil Service Audit is quite a topical issue in our country and its resolution has taken too long and I want to ask if we can hear from you when really we can finally resolve this issue on civil service audit report where we have heard that there are ghost workers amounting to seventy thousand. This is an issue that can help this nation resolve the issue of salaries of our civil servants. I hope that we are going to be able to give our deserving civil servants salaries that are adequate to really shut them up in terms of their complaints everyday of not being paid enough money to sustain themselves. So I thought that…..
THE DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order hon. member, I think the minister has heard your question because it is very clear.
MR. JEMBERE: In a nutshell I just want to ask the Deputy Prime Minister, when are we going to resolve the issue of ghost workers and the issue of civil servants earning enough money to sustain themselves?
THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER (PROF. MUTAMBARA): Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for that question and say that the issues that he raised are work in progress. The Minister of Public Service have spoken about these matters in this House and without pre-empting his detailed response, I would like to say that we are harmonising the findings from the ministry with the views from the public serving service. Having done that we will be able to release the final output of the civil service audit. However, let me emphasise that as a Government, our policy is to have a right sized civil service, our policy is to have an efficient civil service, our policy is to have a well paid and motivated civil service. In pursuit of those objectives, we established that civil service audit and Minister Mukonoweshuro will be able to speak authoritatively on this subject after consultations between his ministry and the public service commission.
MR. S. MOYO: My question is directed to the Minister of Education. Can he enlighten the House how far he is with the special model schools programme?
THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, ARTS, SPORTS AND CULTURE (SENATOR COLTART): To explain fully to the hon. members the background to this issue, I need to say that one of our dilemmas in the ministry is, whilst our primary objective is to restore quality education to all children, because of the huge financial requirements and financial constraints facing Zimbabwe at the present time, there is a real danger that whereas we might be able to provide a basic quality education to all children, we cannot guarantee that children are going to be able to go right through to ‘O’ level and ‘A’ level, those children who have the intellect and aptitude to do so.
There is also a fact that most of our schools are seriously dilapidated. The issue regarding text books is part of the problem. A huge amount of the problems that we face is that even if we have provided schools with textbooks, we find that many rural schools are dilapidated. There are holes on the roofs, there are no window panes and there are no desks. So we have massive problems that we face from the financial perspective. Coming back to this fundamental concern – what do we do about children who are supremely talented but coming from disadvantaged family backgrounds? How do we ensure that they are identified, natured and are given the best education so that we get throughput of those children from primary, secondary to tertiary education?
I discussed these issues with the Hon. Deputy Prime Minister Prof Mutambara who knows this issue personally. He is a good example of it and he does not mind using his example. He lost his father at a young age and he has an obvious great intellect which would have been lost to this nation if that intellect had not been identified and natured. The tragedy is that there are possibly thousands of supremely talented children in our nation who come from disadvantaged backgrounds who face the prospect of perhaps getting a grade seven education or a rudimentary secondary education. So in the last two years, we have been working on a policy to try and establish a certain number of academies that will ensure regional and gender equities throughout the country. The proposal that we have is that initially, there should be 20 academies, two per province with the idea that every province will have at least one boys’ and one girls’ high school. We will focus resources on those government schools, restore and rehabilitate them. Identify the best possible headmasters and teachers for those schools and then develop a scholarship programme, working with primary schools headmasters and headmistresses and local community leaders who will identify the talented, disadvantaged children in their communities.
The intention is to channel those talented disadvantaged children into these academies. So that their talents can be nurtured and developed so that they can get the best ‘O’ and ‘A’ level education and become our future mathematicians and scientists and engineers. So that is the policy. However, we had difficulties in raising sufficient resources and I think that is the basis of the hon. member’s question because this has taken more than two years to mobilise the resources. But I am pleased to tell the hon. members that we have finally managed to get a certain amount of money from the German Government which has recently indicated that it is going to provide some capital for this and the hon. Minister of Finance, in last year’s budget, has allocated some US$3 million.
This is not all that we need because we will not be able to do all 20 schools, but our intention in the course of this year is to identify four or five schools to develop them as a pilot project. Hopefully, we can encourage further donor support and government support. It can be very difficult to identify which four or five schools because obviously every province will want its own, but we will try to do it in an equitable way.
In conclusion, I heard by the end of this year, this programme will be up and running.
MR. BHASIKITI: Can the Hon. Minister explain further why after his ascendancy to the ministry, the private schools have continued to hike school fees to the level where it is unbearable? They are creating an elitist system now and he is numb about their behaviour.
THE DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order, order, that is not a supplementary question, it is a new question altogether.
Questions Without Notice interrupted by THE DEPUTY SPEAKER in terms of Standing Order Number 34.