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Minister Dokora, be realistic

Opinion & Analysis
Primary and Secondary Education minister Lazarus Dokora’s call for schools to sue parents who default on payment of levies is laughable

Primary and Secondary Education minister Lazarus Dokora’s call for schools to sue parents who default on payment of levies is laughable coming from someone who has been a teacher and also purports to represent a rural constituency.

NewsDay Editorial

At an unhelpful Press conference on Monday, Dokora said: “On the issue of defaulting parents and guardians [in rural areas], schools must take recourse through presenting a list of parents owing money in levies to traditional leaders, who should then summon the parents to court.”

In urban centres, he said school heads should take them to small-claims courts.

It would have been useful if the honourable minister had cited the relevant statutory instrument which informs this procedure and any precedents thereof.

Since there is neither the statutory instrument nor the precedent, the minister should have taken his time to explain the process for him to be taken seriously.

Dokora should know that parents are defaulting not because they just don’t wish to pay for their children’s education. In rural areas, the majority of families hardly ever have access to any money. If they do, it is used mostly to buy food. Urban poverty is also on the rise and most poor families live on less than a dollar a day.

Traditional leaders know very well the financial status of their subjects and would not wish to waste their time pursuing something they know will never happen; they also don’t wish to poison their relationship with their subjects.

It is also important for Dokora to realise that education is a basic human right and government is duty-bound to ensure that all children have access.

It is government’s duty (and in the education sector, Dokora is the face of that government) to ensure that this inalienable right is fulfilled. Government’s failure to provide important social services such as education should not be transferred to parents.

However, Zimbabwean parents are always known to be only too willing to assist in school development programmes. And, who says this should only be in the form of money? Innovative headmasters and school development committees have long realised that parents can contribute in different ways.

In the communities different skills exist. There are woodworkers, bricklayers and metal workers, too. Each of these skills could be harnessed by the school.

In dire cases, parents and guardians who can’t raise money could, for example, be asked to make bricks, where every thousand bricks a family makes are given a monetary value. They could also be asked to do general maintenance work such as repairing roads and classrooms.

But obviously there are those who are able to pay in hard cash. These should be encouraged to do so and the money used to buy goods and services needed in the schools which cannot be sourced locally.

Dokora should be realistic and urge schools to come up with innovative ways to go around the problem of parents not being able to pay levies, instead of prescribing pie-in-the-sky strategies which everyone knows will never work.