Stakeholders urged to refocus

Herald Reporter

There is need for the nation to work together to mitigate the Covid-19-induced challenges in the education sector, which have seen pupils losing out during the national lockdown.

Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Minister Professor Amon Murwira told Parliament yesterday that people should refocus and work together in exploring solutions.

Prof Murwira said this while fielding questions during the Question and Answer session in the National Assembly.

Legislators had enquired how Government was addressing challenges in the education sector, which has seen low attendance of teachers in some public schools.

Prof Murwira said it was not prudent to defer school examinations.

“Our intention is never to punish our pupils. The intention is to ensure that they do not lose out on account of Covid-19. It is never our intention to deny our students access to education.

“We are faced with a situation where flexibility and rewiring of strategies has to happen.

“We cannot expect the normalcy that we had in 2019 with students sitting in class with teachers. We have Covid-19. The whole nation has to work together to meet our strategies.”

Prof Murwira said Government had introduced several mitigatory measures such as online learning, radio lessons, among others.

Responding to another question, Energy and Power Development Minister Zhemu Soda defended the new electricity tariffs.

Minister Soda said the new tariff structure was meant to restore competitiveness at the power utility given that it last reviewed them in March this year.

He said domestic power consumers continued to enjoy lower tariffs considering that Zesa was charging them less than the cost of importing power.

“The increase was meant to restore competitiveness at Zesa and make it a going concern,” said Minister Soda.

“We are actually subsiding domestic consumers.”

Some legislators had complained that the new tariffs did not reflect what ordinary persons were earning.

Minister Soda said it was critical to ensure viability of the power utility and in doing so, they had considered what people were earning, hence they were charging nominal tariffs to domestic consumers.