SW Radio Africa

By Lance Guma

22 July 2010

Three cabinet ministers from the two MDC formations, plus Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, were in London on Thursday addressing two separate meetings that sought to woo investors and donors to help with Zimbabwe’s economic recovery. The ministers were accompanied by their permanent secretaries and other senior civil servants from their ministries.

Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister, Senator David Coltart, addressed a conference to drum up support for the education sector. The conference was put together by the Commonwealth Consortium for Education and the Link Community Development. Present at the meeting were several donor agencies and NGO’s working in the field of education and Coltart pitched his future plans for rehabilitating the education sector in Zimbabwe.

Across town in Westminster, Deputy Prime Minister Mutambara, cabinet ministers Joel Gabbuza (Public Works) and Sam Sipepa Nkomo (Water Resources) attended an investment conference organized by the Zimbabwe Institute of Engineers. Among those invited to speak was Econet’s CEO Douglas Mboweni, Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to the UK Gabriel Machinga and former Industry and Trade Minister Nkosana Moyo, now Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the African Development Bank.

The Zimbabwe Institute of Engineers said the conference was “intended to bring together the government of Zimbabwe, diplomats, engineers, consultants, investors, financiers, fund managers and multi-national companies, to examine infrastructure investment opportunities in the four key areas of water, sanitation, transportation, energy and ICTs.”

Newsreel spoke to Senator Coltart on the sidelines of the education conference and asked him how the coalition hoped to resolve the challenges facing the country if their ZANU PF partners continued pulling in a different direction and continued with their endless human rights violations. Coltart said there were elements in ZANU PF that were determined to see the coalition collapse.

“It’s very difficult given there are elements within ZANU PF who don’t like this agreement, in fact who hate it and who want to break it and they, I believe are the ones behind these egregious acts. They are the ones directing these prosecutions and directing ongoing farm invasions. Their purpose is clear. To keep the international community disengaged, to try to force the combined MDC formations to walk away from this agreement.’

Coltart said although they could not dismiss or ignore these actions they had to find a way to work around them and ‘have in mind that the ultimate goal is this transition.’ He said they were hoping a new constitution, new electoral laws and the freeing up of the media would lead to a free and fair election or at the very least an election better than the one held last time.

A participant in the meeting questioned the minister on what impact the sale of diamonds, recently approved by the Kimberly Process, would have on the attempts to revamp the education sector. Coltart found it difficult to answer this and admitted he was going to be vague, saying they were trying to put measures in place to ensure money from the diamonds would find its way into state coffers and not just into the hands of the ruling elite.

There has been criticism that while Mugabe’s regime focus on retaining power they are using the MDC face of the government to go around the world asking for money to rebuild the country. On Thursday it was there for all to see, with 3 cabinet ministers from the MDC formations doing the PR for the government in a western country, while ZANU PF appointed permanent secretaries and other probable CIO minders looked on.

Zimbabwean

By Fungi Kwaramba

22 July 2010

HARARE – More than 15 000 teachers have rejoined the profession since the unity government took office last year and improved salaries for civil servants including teachers, Education Minister David Coltart said last week. 

However Coltart said while remuneration for teachers was sufficient to lure them back to classrooms it remained well below preferable levels, adding that he was pushing the government to improve salaries for the country’s educators.
“Despite the low salaries that teachers are getting over 15 000 have returned since last year blanket amnesty for all teachers to return,” Coltart said last week.
“Teachers are being paid sufficiently to get back into the system, but I reiterate that I understand that teachers salaries are inadequate and I am continuously arguing in cabinet for equality in the civil service. There are many people in the civil service who are being paid far more than teachers,” he added.
Education experts say Zimbabwe requires about 150 000 trained teachers for effective teaching but has plus or minus 100 000 teachers in schools because of a severe brain drain that saw thousands of the country’s best qualified educators either leaving the country for better paying jobs abroad or leaving teaching to join other more rewarding sectors of the economy.
Several hundreds more teachers are also said to have left schools especially in rural areas after unprecedented post-electoral violence that swept across the country following the defeat of President Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu (PF) party in elections in March 2008.
Teachers were targeted for attack by Zanu (PF) militia and war veterans who accused them of campaigning for the then opposition MDC party of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
The exodus of teachers coupled with the government’s inability over the past 10 years of recession to maintain schools or provide learning materials such as chalks, textbooks and exercise books has left Zimbabwe’s once revered education sector a mere shadow of its former self.
Coltart, who has battled to revive the public education sector despite scarce resources, said his ministry will push hard to restore dignity to the teaching profession that many young Zimbabweans now shun because of its record of poor pay and working conditions.
He said: “My first priority is to ensure that teachers are paid sufficiently so as to restore their integrity. The good side is that we have an incredibly dedicated teaching staff which is the essential ingredient in improving the education sector.”
Teachers in Zimbabwe’s public schools earn an average US$236 monthly wage as the power-sharing government struggles to revive an economy battered by years of hyperinflation, lure back investors and pay its workers.

New Zimbabwe.com

By Mduduzi Mathuthu

21 July 2010

EDUCATION Minister David Coltart says Western sanctions on Zimbabwe are “past their sell-by-date” and are now being used by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party to hinder the full implementation of a 2008 power sharing agreement.

Coltart, who describes his relationship with Mugabe over the last 30 years as “chequered”, also insists in a BBC interview that the pact signed following disputed and violence-marred elections was the only non-violent option available to the President’s rivals.

Asked by the BBC’s Hardtalk host Stephen Sackur if he thought sanctions should be lifted, Coltart replied: “They were largely symbolic, there were never any economic sanctions against Zimbabwe, they were targeted against individual members. Those who imposed these sanctions gave so much notice for example on the financial sanctions that most Zanu PF hierarchy actually got their money out, so they never really had any impact in the first place.

“Ironically, my view now is that sanctions are being used most effectively by Zanu PF. They use sanctions as the reason why they should not implement other clauses in the [power sharing] agreement. So to that extent, I believe sanctions are past their sell-by-date.”

Mugabe’s party has refused to move on key government appointments until sanctions are lifted — referencing a clause in the Global Political Agreement which implores the power sharing partners to campaign for their removal.

Coltart said the European Union and the United States had shown “understandable scepticism” about a power sharing arrangement which retains President Mugabe, but rails against what he sees as a “purist approach” to Zimbabwe – an approach not exercised anywhere else where countries are coming out of conflict situations.

“They are very sceptical, and I understand why they are sceptical,” Coltart said in the interview which aired on Tuesday and Wednesday. “They view Robert Mugabe as a wily politician. I think that they are wrong. I think they are trying to be purist in their approach. They didn’t apply that standard to the Good Friday Agreement [in Northern Ireland] …

“If people in Ireland said they weren’t going to enter into an agreement because of what the IRA had done in the past, there would never have been a Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland would be stuck in the mire still.

“If you go back to the Second World War, if you adopted a purist approach, [Winston] Churchill would have never spoken to [Joseph] Stalin. We came to the same point in our history, and you’ve got to put the past aside in many respects to move ahead.

“We had a much bigger danger facing our nation, namely total collapse, degeneration … and to that extent, I don’t believe that the international community has given this arrangement a chance.”

Coltart, a long-time critic of Mugabe – first as a human rights lawyer and later as an MP – defended the pact signed between Mugabe’s Zanu PF party and the two rival MDC factions led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara.

“It’s been in many respects a tense relationship. It’s very hard to trust anyone who has been responsible for gross human rights violations,” Coltart, a senior member of Mutambara’s MDC, said of his own personal relationship with the President. “But what applies nationally, applies personally. We had no other viable non-violent option other than to go into this arrangement, and to that extent we have to put history aside and work in the interests of the nation — and that includes working with Robert Mugabe.”

Zimbabwean

By Fungi Kwaramba

21 July 2010

HARARE – Esrom Mukarati 11 (not real name) wakes up everyday and watches his peers going to school. He would dearly love to join them, but his parents do not have money to give him a basic education. As a result he has become a young vendor whose life is tied to selling vegetables.

According to the Minister of Education, Senator David Coltart, thousands of children are in the same boat as Esrom. Their parents are finding it difficult to send them to school and prepare them for a life to come.

“I last went to school in May when schools opened but I was expelled because my parents could not afford the fees,” said Esrom.

Such is the tale of the young boy whose hopes of one day becoming a doctor are fast fading into the oblivion.

But Coltart is well aware of this and is currently in the process of making basic education free to all so that children like Esrom, whose parents are unemployed, will have an equal opportunity with others, at least at primary school level.

According to latest statistics from the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee (ZVAC): Of the pupils of school going age (6-17years), 86 % were attending school, 8% were drop outs, 3% had left school, 2 % were not attending school and 1% had never been to school.

However Coltart does not entirely agree with the ZVAC saying that the statistics are very conservative, in some areas especially in rural areas 75% of students have dropped out of school.

“As the Minister of Education my number one priority is to restore education for all and after that to restore the integrity of the teachers. It does not matter how many text books you have as long as morale is low among the teaching staff then they will not be any progress in restoring basic education,” said Coltart.

“We are currently in breach of the International Convention of Children Rights to which Zimbabwe is a signatory. It says that children should have access to education this has been caused by the fact that the costs of education has been transferred to parents due to underfunding by the state,” he added.

Thousands of teachers mostly of Mathematics, Science and English have left the profession due to the low salaries that the pre-Inclusive Government was offering. While a significant number of the teachers have returned between the period of 2009 and 2010 many students are being expelled from school due to failure to pay the mandatory top up payments that teachers are demanding in order to supplement the salaries that the cash strapped government affords them.

Even though the Government of Zimbabwe has a facility Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) to help poor children like Esrom see through their education; it is now overwhelmed by the number of children who are in need of assistance.

“We need to review BEAM so that all children who need assistance get it; we have more parents who cannot afford education. Ultimately though we will have to reintroduce free education for primary education, however that needs money which the government does not have.

“The education sect has been under funded and that has seen the collapse of education in the country. We have seen the deterioration of the physical buildings at schools, we have also seen a dramatic reduction in the student book ratio,” said Coltart.

However, Coltart said the picture was not all bleak as the Government has already secured $42million of the $52million which his ministry required in order to resuscitate the education sector which has been on a free fall.

“We have started re-introducing basic education. Teachers are going back to school and education material is being distributed to schools. Shortly we will be delivering text books that will see the student to text book ratio dropping to one and then we will move to refurbishing the toilets at schools which are in had shape. Our initial target will be the sanitary conditions so that we will ensure that every school is safe,” he said.

However, for now, children like Esrom will have to wait a little for the Government to re-introduce free education which the minister said has already started to take place in Zimbabwe Primary Schools.

www.isria.com

21 July 2010

Lord Howell, Foreign Office Minister met with David Coltart, Zimbabwe’s Minister for Education, Sports, Art and Culture this morning.

The Ministers discussed the progress that has been made since the formation of the Inclusive Government. Zimbabwe still suffers from rule of law abuses and economic difficulties, but Lord Howell congratulated the reformers, including David Coltart, on the tangible improvements their efforts had brought to the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans. He assured Minister Coltart of the UK’s continuing assistance to help bolster reform and achieve their aims of a stable, democratic and prosperous Zimbabwe.

A former human rights lawyer and an MDC-M Senator in Zimbabwe’s Inclusive Government, Mr Coltart has been instrumental in turning around the education sector, encouraging 15,000 teachers to return to work so that schools could re-open and Zimbabwe can regain its reputation as education leaders in Africa.

The UK has helped the Department for International Development along with other donors provided funding so that every primary school child in the country will have a full set of core school books. DFID support has also helped to ensure that over 600,000 orphans and vulnerable children will be able to attend school this year.