Chronicle Editor
Stanely Mushava Features Correspondent —
Government has intervened to curtail opacity and abuse in schools by wrestling control of funds from school development associations.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education is set to centralise handling of levies under a National Building Fund, while schools will take care of their day-to-day business from individual School Services Fund bank accounts.
The changes are expected to be implemented beginning next term. However, as the ministry rings these changes , there is need to retain a place for parental involvement and democratic scrutiny in the financial administration of schools.
The new arrangement must come with observable mechanisms to rule out entangling schools in red tape and embezzlement. These must come out clearly during the consultations scheduled by the ministry for next month.
According to a recent Sunday Mail report, the ministry is soliciting input for the establishment of a National Building Fund for schools to tap into for infrastructure development.
Each school will also be required to set up a single School Services Fund in terms of the Education Act which the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education is currently aligning with the Constitution.
Schools are to contribute to the fund but it will be centrally controlled by the ministry, moving away from the traditional arrangement whereby development projects were locally administered.
The two funds will dramatically diminish the place of SDAs which were paired with school administration in 1989 to enable parental input and democratic scrutiny into the handling of funds and development projects.
Under this arrangement, fees and levies, amounting to $1.2bn in 2015 alone, were deposited into SDA accounts but many instances of abuse by committee members, school heads and bursars have recurred.
Deputy Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Prof Paul Mavima told The Sunday Mail that a national consultative process will soon commence and will spill into next month.
“This means that, finalisation will be in early 2017, immediately followed with implementation of the Statutory Instrument(s) and the initiation of joint venture partnerships (JVPs),” he said.
The deputy minister said the statutory instruments will be entered into force in early 2017 after taking into account the suggestions of stakeholders to be gathered during the consultations.
“The SDA and SDC (School Development Committee) instruments are being rationalised so that a single governance regime can be instituted and there is uniformity in the manner in which schools are governed,” he added.
Apparently, the National Building Fund will also facilitate the building of new schools to address the current shortage of more than 2 000 schools.
“Within the governance issue, there is also going to be the issue of the National Building Fund and how it will be populated with resources that will allow the ministry to fully implement JVPs as a way of resolving the massive school infrastructure deficit that the nation faces,” Prof Mavima said.
Parents, through SDAs, acquired a stake in school administration when Government acknowledged them as primary partners in financing education.
According to “The Presidential Commission into Education and Training” (commonly known as the Nziramasanga Report) of 1999, allowing parents greater responsibility was understood to enhance their confidence in the education of their children and provide them with incentives to improve effectiveness of the school.
However, SDAs have conspired with school administrations to embezzle funds, thereby prejudicing the interests of the children whose welfare they are deployed to protect.
“We know for a fact that more than US$1, 2 billion is collected through levies, and if only half of that was used to develop the schools we would be talking of something else,” Primary and Secondary Education Minister Lazarus Dokora said in a previous interview.
“We have a backlog of 2 000 schools and are collecting a lot of money. How then do we explain the backlog in infrastructure development? Some schools are overstaffed and these employees earn far more than teachers and heads on civil service salaries. This has become a conduit for corruption,” said Minister Dokora.
“There is a disconnect between the levies collected and their use. Most of these schools’ levy collection systems are robust, but when it comes to use, (it’s a different story altogether). What the auditors observed was shocking. It’s clear the situation cannot remain like that,” he said.
Government is best placed to play a redistributive function and ensure that the infrastructure gap is addressed. However, centralisation is not without its problems.
Key is to ensure that changes do not jeopardise the benefits of decentralisation. The anticipated changes are inspired by the need for transparency but must not rule out the importance of parental involvement.
There must be an efficient feedback loop to enabled parents sustained involvement since they pay fees and are primarily responsible for the children. Basic education in Zimbabwe was centralised during the early years of Independence to reverse colonial anomalies, ceding responsibility to parents in 1989.
Under the centralised dispensation, Government’s incapacity to finance schools, donor fatigue and the millstone of bureaucracy were weighing down schools from developing at a reasonable pace.
Centralisation has a history of privileging elites with funds meant for the grassroots and enabling embezzlement and questionable priorities.
The ministry must forestall these problems lest the latter fraud be greater than the first.
When funds were still centralised, mission responsible authorities and district councils which had been tasked with the financial management of schools converted funds to meet their own needs at the expense of educational needs which they were barely in touch with.
Even now, there have been problems such as Basic Education Assistance Module (Beam) funds meant for orphans and vulnerable children never reaching them because it would have gone to buy food hampers for Government officials.
In the planned dispensation, ministry arms must constantly report back to schools and communities while retaining an open door to ensure transparency, community oriented development and democratic scrutiny into the running of funds.
The Nziramasanga Report envisioned development, autonomy, healthy competition, greater responsibility by schools and the communities they serve, faster decision-making and generally greater efficiency under decentralisation.
There must be observable mechanisms to retain these advantages. The report also notes that decentralisation would achieve a balance of educational provision in all provinces, districts and villages, strengthen local political institutions and increase people’s participation in development and boost mobilisation of local resources.
That sense of ownership needs to be maintain to allow parents to feel more responsible for their schools. Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (TUZ) chief executive officer Manuel Nyawo has previously noted in these columns that is better monitoring the current mechanism instead of effecting an overhaul and side-lining parents.
“It would be cumbersome for schools to have to go through the ministries to get money for projects they would want to get done in the soonest of time. “If ministry takes such a course, it will only bring bureaucracy into the running of schools. It will only work to the detriment of development for the ministry to have to approve everything schools need from a central point,” he said.
The consultations lined up for the coming month must allow the ministry to clarify how it intends rule out bureaucracy and abuse in the forthcoming dispensation.
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