ARTUZ Concerned about threats of closing rural schools

The Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ) is concerned with the reckless and unconstitutional utterances attributed to the excitable Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (MPoSE), one Sylvia Utete- Masango.

According to media reports, Utete-Masango, famous for her aristocratic tastes, threatened to shut down over 40 schools in Matabeleland South because of allegedly low enrolment. The permanent secretary was quoted saying that "running schools that have low enrolment is not viable (sic)."

Her utterances betray the obvious lack of concern she has for the over 90% of rural poor who constitute 60% of the country's population and can barely afford education fees at the moment. Further, they confirm ARTUZ's findings in its report for the second term, that education is undergoing wholesale privatization.

To elites, like Utete-Masango, education must be for the rich who can afford it otherwise the poor do not make it a 'viable' enterprise because they will not foot the bill. It is this thinking which has seen people like her export their children like fruits to exotic learning centres in Singapore, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and South Africa, while they run down the local education system.

ARTUZ therefore wishes to educate this elite woman, whose love for opulence would make Marie Antoinette turn in her grave, on a few but fundamental international law and constitutional lessons regarding the Right to Education which she seeks to violate by her actions.

Education is a fundamental human right which is protected by a raft of international conventions to which Zimbabwe is a state party to and as Permanent Secretary it is to be expected that she knows these conventions by heart. But since she has displayed extreme ignorance we will do what we know best that is to teach her.

The Right to Education derives its international law basis from Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also from Articles 13 and 14 of the International Covenant on Economic; Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960) then went into greater detail to address the right to education.

Since 1960 it has been reaffirmed in a number of conventions and declarations such as the UNESCO Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (1981), Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (1984). This is a large body of international law provisions which anyone who has undertaken a DPhil in education (as Utete-Masango claims) should have come into interaction with and thus would not open their mouth and utter the rubbish of closing schools because 'low enrolments are not viable.'

In addition to the international provisions, the Constitution of Zimbabwe (Amendment 20 of 2013) has enshrined education as a fundamental right in section 75. Since the permanent secretary seems to be out of sorts with reading we will educate her on the import of this.

Section 75 specifically states that 'every citizen and permanent resident of Zimbabwe has a right to a basic state funded education.' In simple terms it means every Zimbabwean must be able to access education at the expense of the government and it goes without saying that even one, two, three or hundred pupils have this right protected by the constitution and it is not up to the discretion of Utete- Masango to authorize this. It is a requirement of law. More critically it means that education is a public good and therefore not for sale hence the government must put adequate resources into it.

Furthermore, a reading of section 81 (which addresses rights of children) alongside section 75 show that one of the best interest of the child is access to education and the state must make this access possible.

More importantly, section 44 of the same constitution places the duty to respect fundamental human rights and freedoms on every person and every institution or agency of government. One wonders then what drug Utete-Masango is smoking which makes her seek to defy the clear provisions of law. The very same law which creates the ministry she is currently running down.

In its various research papers and statements, ARTUZ has held that one of the stumbling blocks toward enactment of 'policies that work' in the education sector is the incompetence and the carefree and careless attitude of officials manning critical positions in the policy development and implementation matrix.

As a union which fights for pro-poor education policies, ARTUZ will however not allow this madness to go unchallenged. The union will never sit akimbo and let a bunch of clueless elites who live in a reality distorted field continue to run down the education sector. Therefore, as an immediate way forward ARTUZ will tomorrow (24 May 2017) write to the permanent secretary imploring her to stop forthwith the madness she is attempting to implement and put her focus on the real issues like an immediate end to implementing a disastrous curriculum and to provide adequate learning materials to schools.