Chronicle Editor
Takunda Maodza and Abigail Mawonde
ZIMBABWE celebrated 36 years of freedom on Monday. Education ranks as one of the major achievements the country has registered since the end of Rhodesian hegemony. Our success in education is naked for all to see – we sit on the acme in Africa in terms of literacy rate. One has to be highly insane to pretend to be unaware of such a remarkable feat!
Behold, we run the danger of undoing all the good we have achieved so far in the education sector if the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education does not urgently declare a holocaust on corruption stubbornly manifesting itself in schools.
The nation cannot pretend as if all is well when school heads have formed an axis of evil with School Development Committees and some officials in the ministry to loot.
In some incidences, auditors dispatched to schools are fingered as having allegedly covered up for the looters, and only God knows for what reason.
So callous are some of the school heads and SDC members, who we are told boast in meetings that they are untouchable, on the basis of I-know-so-and-so at head office. It is a pain that we get to know of the thievery in schools only when there is a fallout between the school head and SDC members or the school head and the school accounts staff.
Seke 1 High on Tuesday provides a microcosmic example. This is a school where rot resides. Remember Seke 1 High? It is known for drilling a borehole for $19 000, an amount worth drilling seven if not more boreholes.
The borehole issue is not the only evidence of systematised looting at the school, a school bus repaired allegedly for a whopping $27 000 is rotting behind the administration office.
The SDC says it was repaired for $27 000. The company that refurbished the bus says it charged $8 000. Your guess is as good as ours as to the whereabouts of the balance – $19 000. Seems someone at the school is obsessed with the figure $19 000. A borehole worth roughly $3 000 is inflated to $19 000. Refurbishing of the school bus worth $8 000 ballooned to $27 000, difference $19 000!
It is not only at Seke 1 High School where the school head and SDC members have mandated themselves to steal everything in their sight in an amateurish fashion. Even at elite schools in Harare, heads connive with SDCs to siphon funds.
Allegations floating around are that in some instances ministry officials are involved. There is no evidence, however, as to the truth of the allegations besides them emanating from the reluctance of the responsible offices to act even when evidence walks nakedly into their offices. It is this stoicism that has bred suspicion.
A headmaster at one of Harare’s top schools – who happens to be a former official in the ministry – is said to have pocketed a cool $400 000. Yes, close to half a million dollars after conniving with School Development Committee members. Part of the loot was listed as allowances and benefits. The headmaster paid himself $44 111 – as back pay. Of the amount, the school head never paid tax to the State.
As if that was not enough, the headmaster hired a relative for a maid and paid the relative-cum-maid $2 400 plus a $200 monthly allowance. For what? God in heaven knows!
He was not done yet; he bought a school bus for $400 000. An ordinary bus for that amount? Information reaching this office suggests that several reports on the rot at the school were forwarded to the responsible ministry for action. Action has not yet been taken, our sources claim. We trust the sources as they are none but employees at the very school – some have since been relieved of their duties for trying to lift the lid.
The rot does not end at the Harare school. It spreads east to Manicaland where we were recently told by none other Dr Lazarus Dokora himself that schools in the province charged a colonial kind of levy to 500 000 pupils without the knowledge of the ministry.
It is called child levy!
“We also found another layer which we were not aware existed where a whole district might levy something called ‘child levy’ and it is only levied to those of my children in the schools and we have been trying to understand and I have asked the secretary (in the ministry) to work on the matter,” said Dr Dokora in an interview with The Herald on March 30.
The minister confessed that he was unaware that pupils were being charged child levy. He further revealed in the interview that some SDCs members exonerated themselves from paying fees in some other provinces and their children were living in the “free education for all” era.
Such is the rot in schools that if no action is taken as a matter of urgency, we risk falling from the African literacy acme and history will judge us harshly Dr Dokora. It is a fact that corruption has become so endemic and contagious in our society but that is no excuse for the thieving school heads or SDC members. The long arm of the law has to take its course and for it to run riot there has to be a complainant. If that complainant be Dr Dokora the better. Save us from this mess before it is too late.
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