ZIMBABWE: University leaders threatened with jail

Zimbabwe's government has threatened to fire or jail university vice-chancellors and principals accused of expelling students who have failed to raise higher education fees. The higher education managers are in violation of a government decree issued earlier this year.

Several state-run institutions of higher learning have been barring students from writing examinations and entering lecture theatres for failing to raise foreign currency denominated fees ranging from US$400 to US$1,500 per semester, in a country in which civil servants earn less than US$300 per month.

Last month the salary of the country's autocratic ruler, President Robert Mugabe, was increased from US$400 to US$1,700 per month, as Zimbabwe slowly emerges from a decade long economic and political crisis blamed on Mugabe's repressive policies. But benefits are yet to be felt by the majority of the country's citizens.

As a response to the low disposable incomes, government - in what is widely viewed as a populist policy - decreed a few months ago that higher education institutions should not expel students failing to raise the required fees.

But the order has largely fallen on deaf ears as university authorities are under pressure to improve conditions in the face of lack of adequate financial support from central government.

Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education Dr Stan Mudenge, a member of Mugabe's ZANU-PF party - one of the three partners in Zimbabwe's coalition government, which was formed last year to end the country's political crisis - delivered the warning to vice-chancellors and principals at a graduation ceremony at Harare Polytechnic earlier this month.

The minister added that students, who have largely not responded to government's calls to apply for loans under its cadetship programme, should do so to cover expenses for their studies.

"Principals and vice-chancellors must realise that they are violating the law and they will be thrown into jail or fired...I invite students or parents of students who claim to have suffered as a result of the universities expelling them to come forward with the evidence.

"It is government policy that no student will be expelled from college or prevented from writing exams for non-payment of fees," the minister concluded.

Last Wednesday Tafadzwa Mugwati, president of the Zimbabwe National Students' Union (Zinasu), said that after Mudenge's declaration the country's oldest institutions of higher learning - the University of Zimbabwe, Midlands State University and Harare Polytechnic - had continued to expel students.

Also, lecturers had stopped marking expelled students' tutorials, and security officials were still arresting those who turned up for lectures without settling the fees due.

Mugwati added that students were reluctant to participate in the government's cadetship programme as they likened it to slave labour. The Zinasu president suggested that in place of the cadetship system government should rather provide 60% to 70% of costs, with students footing the rest of the bill.

In terms of the government's widely condemned cadetship system, Zimbabwean university students who receive state aid must serve the country and be bonded for a minimum period equal to the period of study, or remit at minimum a third of their salary in foreign currency should they opt to work outside the country.