Editor — From the Finance Minister, Tendai Biti’s allocation of US$5 million to student support in his Mid-Term Fiscal Policy Review on July 14 2010, which was arrived at without consultation with the students of Zimbabwe, we realise the need by the Government of Zimbabwe to re-define the extent and concept of student support.
The money that has been allocated to each student is far below the fees that are being charged in State tertiary institutions in the range of US$500 per semester.
Notwithstanding, that the actual support per student will be slightly higher than our calculation, which is in the range of US$250 in the context of the cadetship scheme in which the money is coming into effect.
The amount will be higher, thanks to the fact that the scheme excludes most of the students who are in need simply because on the arbitrary cadetship “scale of poverty” they are less in need than the beneficiaries, who are a small section of the entire community of the students of Zimbabwe. Even these lucky beneficiaries would receive small batches of partial payments on, which they will be asked to top up.
The government must realise that, here pre-supposing their political will, the road to returning to student grants can not be achieved without engagement with the private sector and broadening of the scope of institutions like ZIMDEF.
But first we have to broaden together, our mental conceptions of the relevance of student support in the context of a largely rural, developing and education-dependent Zimbabwe. Besides the fact that the final broad realisation of the right to education in Zimbabwe will lead to a pleasant knock-on effect, towards attainment of all other socio-political rights, this is also in the economic sense of developmental direction. The other context of this student support is a Zimbabwe where the government is the largest and the employer of reference where the working standards are concerned.
Currently, civil servants are earning at most about half-way below the poverty datum line of about US$500. Biti, in his Mid-Term Fiscal Policy review proposed, or confirmed the reality of a salary freeze for civil servants.
The question of whether the son or daughter of a civil servant, whose lot constitute the majority of the workers in Zimbabwe, will not be financially shut out of Zimbabwe’s tertiary institutions and high schools in terms of educational accessibility and eventually disempowered, should be interrogated in the context at hand, of rampant deferment of studies by students, high rate of college/university drop-outs and that over 50 000 ‘O’ Level and ‘A’ level students failed to register for their examinations to be written at the end of this year.
The cadetship scheme which is the form of student support at present, requiring top ups by students, beneficiaries, at tertiary institutions does not recognise the necessity of living expenses for students, which are by far the important determinant of whether one will attend university or not.
This regime of expenses is the whole array of money requiring sides of the learning environment that include transport fares, photo-copying expenses to supplement the meagre libraries, catering for our feeding habits, health bills and accommodation fees.
This is the premise on which the government and all stakeholders of education in Zimbabwe should broaden their mental conceptions of student support.
Having done this, they may as well widen their net of seeking for solutions to finally disband the financially discriminatory nature of the crisis which has totally priced education out of the reach of the sons and daughters of the toiling civil servants and peasants progressively, in the last of the two decades after initial emancipation from colonial, educational shackles of discrimination in 1980.
Vivid Gwede,
ZINASU national secretary-general
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