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School girls go through their studies

Stephen Mpofu

Lower Six classes are scheduled to start next week, but many students —  probably hundreds or more of them — among them bright, ordinary level graduates and potential future leaders will be unable to proceed with their education as school authorities thumb their noses on the government over results withheld for non-payment of fees.

This newspaper has in the past few days published stories about several schools in Bulawayo which are refusing to release Form Four results for students with outstanding school fees or other payments.

There are probably other schools elsewhere in this country that also blatantly defy the government order not to hold on to student’s results and instead take parents to court for their failure to settle school fees arrears leaving many more students in the same quandary as their peers in Bulawayo.

Education is the constitutional right for every child in this country. As such, it behoves on the government of the day to protect that right by ensuring that parents or guardians or other sponsors who renege on a requirement for them to pay school fees in full for their children face legal consequences themselves, instead of the hapless, innocent students being made to suffer and in the process losing opportunities for self-development as well as for the development of the motherland.

Is it, for instance, not patently outrageous of a school official to declare that a government directive to schools to take parents to court to recover outstanding fees was setting a wrong precedent in schools as most of the schools were losing both revenue and property such as textbooks.

In addition to outstanding fees, some schools in Bulawayo reportedly also demand payment of money for lost books as well as tuck-shop fund.

But why, in the first place, do schools allow students with outstanding payments to sit their final examinations only to hold back results as ransom for the clearance of unpaid monies?

There is a big chance, or so this pen believes, that if told in advance that students in debt will not write exams their parents or guardians will make frantic efforts to make the required payments.

But as things stand now school authorities, not those in government, appear to be calling the shots.

Which raises the valid and yet embarrassing question about who oversees the execution of education for the benefit of this nation; school authorities or their superiors at the Ministry headquarters in Harare?

It staggers the mind to read about school officials appearing to lecture the government on how schools are run — which is what it suggests when a headmaster says: “schools are run by money. Besides other overheads such as electricity and stationary we still have our own school staff to be paid levies which parents are refusing to pay.”

Such an audacious condescending remark does, in this pen’s humble view, poke the Ministry in the eye, challenging it to stand up and demonstrate who is who between school and government authorities.

If, as it appears to be, a laissez faire approach to ending the pay-the-outstanding-fees-or-no-results saga could result in many children being jettisoned prematurely from schools resorting to unorthodox means of earning a living and ending up in prison as social outcasts, so that whatever potential for future leadership they might have gained early on in their education becomes a write off and the country becomes all the worse without their contribution socially, politically and economically.

It is also imperative here to call a spade a spade by telling parents or guardians to their face that any delinquent act by anyone of them to delay, or all together dodge payment of money due to schools is not only detrimental to their offspring; it besmirches the family’s image, not to mention an impediment to the nation’s development.

Above all, the buck-passing going on between schools and their Ministry on the one hand and the hide-and-seek game between parents and school authorities must come to an end sooner rather than later; otherwise the reputation of this country’s educational system immortalised in Africa’s scholastic book of records will suffer mortally and it might become near impossible for it to recover.