Primary and Secondary Education minister Lazarus Dokora is at it again. After an almost quiet second half of the year, he has come with yet another difficult and largely opaque policy for application for Form One places.
Comment: NewsDay Editor
While Dokora can be said to be trying to be innovative and moving with the times by introducing an online application format, he seems not to be cognisant of the context in which Zimbabwe operates in, where most of the country has no access to online tools or even electricity.
Instead of bringing the wholesale change in the way pupils apply for Form One places, Dokora could have introduced it at a smaller scale and evaluate how it works before even thinking of expanding it to the whole country.
We understand and appreciate innovation, but technological developments should be appropriate and beneficial to everyone, rather than this environment where there is a real risk that they could marginalise a significant proportion of the population.
To add onto that, we do not feel it is the business of a minister to micro-manage how schools are run and instead his role is just to facilitate rather than prescribe.
It is unworkable that all schools should have one day for enrolling pupils for secondary school, and instead they should be allowed to work as and how they see it fit.
If Dokora feels schools are using entrance tests as a means to shake down parents, then he has a right to step in, but, however, he should not go as far as telling them how and when to enrol pupils.
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It is almost obvious that not all the pupils who applied for places will be enrolled to their chosen schools and this is where complications will begin.
Because pupils failed to get places in their top three schools, parents will become desperate and this will be the root of corruption and greed, as education officials will be in a vantage position to demand bribes so children can be enrolled.
To add onto that, Dokora does not explain what will happen if there is a lopsided distribution of applications to some schools and other institutions barely get chosen.
We hope these are some of the things that will be clarified when Dokora meets Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has reportedly summoned the minister to explain how this system works and if the country needs it at all.
The Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association has also expressed its disquiet over the issue and we expect Dokora to lucidly explain how this will work before the whole nation is engulfed in confusion that could have been avoided.
