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Stephen Mpofu
Two damning reports issued by the government this week will no doubt have left Zimbabweans benqunu/bhunyumunyu, or naked, in the eyes of the international community which is wont more often than not to tar both the good and the bad in other countries with the same, filthy brush.
For their part, law-abiding Zimbabweans must have been so infuriated by reported scandals in the land reform programme and in the phenomenal growth in education — both of these crowning feathers in the cap of the armed revolution that wrenched the motherland from what an otherwise implacable grip of white racist rule.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education revealed that an audit it had carried out exposed thefts of school levies on a massive scale, possibly involving more schools across the nation.
A total of 1,800 schools, or 18 percent of schools countrywide audited so far exposed massive doctoring of accounts documents to conceal the scum, according to Deputy Minister Professor Paul Mavhima.
He said: “The round of audits that we did unearthed a number of problems. The most common was abuse of Staff Development Committee funds and the typical problem was in the receipting process where different amounts are written in the top copy and the carbon copy. Typically the top copy because it’s going to the person paying the money, reflects a smaller amount.”
Schools raise about $1 billion through levies each year and Professor Mavhima said if misappropriation of the money continued unabated, schools would be incapacitated in undertaking infrastructural development which is obviously key to the continued expansion of education begun in the early years of independence.
But not only that. Crowded or limited learning conditions in schools will compromise the quality of education which at a rating of 91 percent has catapulted Zimbabwe to the top as the most literate nation in Africa.
Parents pay the levies, in some cases under trying domestic, economic conditions, especially in rural areas, because they want the best for their children from education. Now to have some creeping maggots somewhere munching the sweat of other people through an apparently well-rehearsed scam, and this is tantamount not only to undermining and destroying the future of Zimbabwe’s children, it also threatens the future of the motherland as schools provide the much-needed skills for driving the economy.
This pen sincerely believes, however, that the rampant scam will not be brought to an end merely through an audit of all the schools in the country, as suggested by Professor Mavhima. Two additional measures appear necessary to bring finality once and for all to the accounts-doctoring scandal and theft of the levies.
The first such action which should be taken concomitantly with the audit must be the arrest and prosecution of those people whose deft hands were used to try to deceive the government concerning the exact amounts paid in levies by parents.
That measure persuades this pen, and no doubt other law-and God-fearing citizens that any would-be fiddlers with levies at schools will develop cold feet certain that the law will definitely catch up with them. The second suggested measure involves the institution of a no-nonsense schools inspectorate whose mere mention will undoubtedly cause trepidation in the hearts of anyone contemplating theft or diversion of money meant for the improvement of education in the country.
A semblance of such an inspectorate plied its trade in colonial Rhodesia where news of its proximity to schools sent the heads of those institutions inspecting their books to be sure that they bore no riffraff that would lead to their dismissal.
Having laboured so much to bring education in this country to its pinnacle, the envy of other African states, Zimbabwe should not allow the crown it wears in education and literacy, including functional literacy — relating reading and writing to practical work —knocked off its head by those who want to get rich quickly by pilfering funds not meant for them.
Then in comes probably the second most important thing after uhuru — the repossession of land much of it dispossessed from blacks in this country through force by white settler farmers.
Land, after all – its repossession – served as the driving spirit of the armed revolution because land has always been the soul of any nation whatsoever.
In the heydays of colonial rule by Britain and her proxies and then by rebels after 1965 until independence in April 1980, blacks in this country literary scratched, like chickens, small and often infertile pieces of land for survival while whites, mostly those of British and Dutch origin squatted on vast tracts of land in some of which their livestock ranged, like wild animals and would flee at the sight of a black person anywhere near them.
It was only logical, therefore, that the Zanu-PF government thought it wise to reclaim the land from which the people had been alienated before independence after the British government reneged on its Lancaster independence talks commitment to compensate whites for the land that the black government would repossess from whites for redistribution to the black majority who needed that asset the most.
Now comes the scam through illegal downsizing of farms which has since been stopped in all provinces by the Ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement after it reportedly discovered that the exercise was being abused by some officers to settle scores.
For instance, some lands officers are accused of allocating subdivided pieces of land to relatives and friends, thereby subverting the process genuinely meant for the provision of subdivisions to all who genuinely deserved the land in order to maximise food production and with that achieve food security for beneficiaries and ultimately for the nation as a whole.
But what enters the ears of livid Zimbabweans at the land scandal? The culprits have reportedly either been redeployed to other ministries or sent on forced leave.
But do the officers charged with subverting an exercise so important to the lives of Zimbabweans, and to the image of the country — as well as one that should impact positively to countries where blacks are still deprived of their inalienable right to land — deserve to be treated with such kid gloves?
If, indeed, the officers concerned were corrupt, does not their redeployment amount to promoting creeping maggots from where they have caused untold damage to new areas where they might proceed with causing the rot there?
If the ministry concerned has concrete evidence of wrongdoing against the officers in point why then the hesitation in sending the alleged offenders away in handcuffs to await trial for the misdeeds with which they are charged by their employer?
One would surely believe that redeployment and forced leave were concrete evidence with which the employer would proceed with prosecution; otherwise other offenders will stay put as long as they are certain no one will uncover their corruption.
Surely, anyone tampering with land reform in whatever way is unwittingly or deliberately undermining the revolution that brought this country a new political dispensation through the re-christening of Rhodesia as Zimbabwe to mark the end of a protracted, armed liberation struggle.
Now there will be ugly repercussions going beyond our borders from any unorthodox manner in which land reform is handled – and the corruption involved in the subdivisions of farms will certainly have a telling effect on countries that look to Zimbabwe for direction in implementing such reforms in their own countries.
This is because while the land reform programme is touted by Zimbabweans and other nations as the best way to proceed with equalising land rights, some minority races in neighbouring countries who happen to sit on massive tracts of land while the black majority there crowd on small pieces of land will use any sign of corruption in this country to strengthen their opposition to any land reform plans in their country.
So Zimbabwe will essentially influence positive or negative reaction to people in southern Africa who have land reform programmes on their drawing boards, waiting to action them.
Here at home, the people out there on the land should police the land reform programme to stop any acts of its subversion by anyone from any social structure because it is they, after all, who stand to benefit from the exercise to spread land out to those who have little of it.
The policing exercise suggests that the people who are given land or have possessed it since the reform programme started in the year 2000 and are using it for speculative purposes or merely to drum their chests for possessing the land they cannot fully utilise are reported to the authorities.
The reason for this is very simple: land reform was and is still meant to reverse the bromide whereby fewer people possess obscenely huge farms some of which remained fallow while the majority over-tilled small pieces of land to eke out their existence.
In retrospect, unearthing of the scandal involving the subdivisions of farms should serve as a clarion call for the government to weigh in with a massive broom to clean up the mess and send the offenders to do unpaid labour in our prisons as also some kind of contrition for taking this nation for a ride through their wrong deeds.
Online Reporter