The ManicaPost
LLOYD Dube and his wife Thandiwe Mashava are teachers at Locklee High School; they have been there since 2000 and braved the economic meltdown that characterised the last three years of the previous decade. At the height of the stagflation that rocked Zimbabwe, Locklee gave beans and buckets of maize to the teachers as a way of incentivising them to remain at the institution in spite of the deepening economic and social malaise.
Parents could not afford fees and school administrators thought outside the box to keep their schools viable; they introduced that novel way of survival. Consequently, students continued coming to school in spite of the harsh economic climate prevailing at that time.
2009 came with the Minister of Education, David Coltart, giving tacit approval to the payment of incentives by schools to retain staff. Most boarding schools pegged a minimum $200 as incentives. The Dubes built a house in town; they have a car thanks to the incentives.
In most rural schools, incentives were divisive as the heads claimed that there was simply no money in the school coffers to pay incentives. As a result, there are incentive arrears that run into hundreds or thousands of dollars in most schools. As they say in slang, ‘yafa yakaloadha,’ so our teachers don’t have any legal recourse to redress the unfortunate circumstances. Is that a correct interpretation of the state of affairs with regards to the frozen incentives?
Some legal experts aver that incentive arrears have to be paid as they fall out of the time period as spelt out by the circular banning incentives. As I intimated in my last instalment, silence from the relevant ministry on critical issues makes heads interpret circulars in manners that they want.
However, in this regard, heads also stand to benefit from a correct interpretation which is: give teachers their dues and then stop paying them starting this term.
Teacher representatives must look into that loophole. If teachers were promised to be given their incentives, once the financial situation of the school improves, then it goes without saying that the school owes them and must pay up the moment it gets money. Of course, the school pays the arrears and develops the school at the same time.
In my other opinion piece, I wrote about the heads who use debt collectors to force defaulters to cough up the fees arrears. Apparently, that crusade is paying dividends.
We must never forget that fees were pegged with incentives in mind. Who benefits from this incentive fee? Those defaulters are paying and teachers have a right to get the backdated incentives right up to April before a circular banning incentives was given to school heads. Where is the money going to be used if the teachers, bona fide recipients of incentives during that period, can’t get it?
Granted, heads and education authorities are policy implementers but they must not lose sight of the aspect of justice. Now the heads are adhering to ministry policy but they conveniently forget that they did not give incentives with such alacrity and zeal as they are exhibiting, now that incentives have been banned.
Something is not right here! What is going on here?
I have always maintained that teacher representatives are a bunch of busybodies who do not know where they are coming from or where they are going. How does one explain their deafening silence about the ban of incentives and the subsequent forfeiting of the incentive arrears for the majority of the teachers?
My humble submission is for the teachers’ union to engage legal experts on the way forward for those teachers who may have last received incentives in 2011 or thereabouts. Thereafter, all teachers must be aware of what is going to happen to their ‘‘lost’’ incentives. These unions take a lot of money by virtue of monthly subscriptions but their efficacy is zilch to say the least.
If we go back to the issue of incentives being divisive, we may be right in saying teachers in the rural areas were the disadvantaged lot. Urban and boarding schools teachers smiled all the way to the bank during the era of incentives. Whenever strike action was mooted by unions, no one heeded the call in those schools where incentives pacified them. That observation is true if one looks at it with tinted eyes.
Fellow Zimbabweans, who said life is fair?
Private schools always gave their teachers and ancillary staff some incentives outside the Government salaries. Thus, some years ago, there was an outcry over a supposedly abnormal desk fee of $5 000 at a time the nation’s majority was wallowing in poverty.
Freedom of choice is there in our constitution; therefore, it is in bad taste to dissuade willing school authorities to make their teachers and staff to remain loyal, because of what they get from the SDC. High teacher turnover impacts negatively on the student more than it does the teacher. If authorities were to visit the academic powerhouses, they would notice the loyalty exhibited by the staff.
If they probed deeper, they would see ‘‘incentives’’ put in place to ensure that a teacher remains at the school until he retires. At times, some teachers don’t apply for promotion in order to remain at the school where ‘‘incentives’’ albeit silent ones, are given.
Are fees going to be reduced, dear minister, now that incentives have been officially withdrawn? I don’t think so. What is the minister going to do about it? Will he let the status quo remain thus? No one knows as there is no public relations office within the ministry to answer such questions. If it is there, let it come out in the open and let people talk before taking drastic measures. Those are the sentiments of some stakeholders when the writer asked them to proffer their input in the contemporary debate on the ban of incentives.
As for the impact of banning incentives, it may take long before authorities can ascertain effects, mostly on the negative side. The teachers’ employer is the Government. Parents are also reeling from the inhospitable economic climate in the same manner that teachers suffer. With that in mind, it is important to accept the ban and hope that the Government will continue to review upwards their salaries and conditions of service.
