Thaw in international relations boosting higher education

After nearly two decades, Zimbabwe is seeing signs of a thaw in relations when it comes to the higher education sector, which has been affected by the sanctions that were imposed by Western countries.

The sanctions were imposed in response to the appalling human rights record of the late president Robert Mugabe. Mugabe insisted that Zimbabwe was being punished for rolling out the fast-track land reform programme that resulted in the violent seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution to black people.

In 2018, government-funded scientific research by academics at the University of Zimbabwe into the economic impact of sanctions found that the country had lost about US$4.8 billion in revenue in the manufacturing sector in 2010 and US$2.1 billion in 2015. Skilled professionals were also fleeing the country.

European scholarships on offer

In an interview with University World News, Zimbabwe Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Ambassador Frederick Shava said that, although sanctions remain in place, relations in the higher education sector were starting to thaw. This is evidenced by European countries offering Zimbabwean students scholarships through the government.

“Through our re-engagement and engagement policy, we are continuing to campaign against the sanctions. We have seen some movement in the European countries in terms of higher education,” he said.

“So far, we have 1,000 scholarships that will go to our students. Italy has offered us 2,000 scholarships. This is a new thing. We have not seen that in the past two decades,” Shava said.

The minister said the foreign affairs ministry was going to liaise with the ministry of higher education regarding the distribution of the scholarships.

In 2019, leaders of 16 countries constituting the Southern African Development Community, or SADC region, declared 25 October a day of solidarity against sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by Western countries, measures it says have spawned a massive brain drain and paralysed its higher education sector.

Sanctions triggered brain drain

Zimbabwe marked the SADC anti-sanctions day in 2021 with speeches and marches as well as solidarity messages from regional presidents to pressure Western countries into removing the sanctions.

The theme of the commemorations was ‘Friend to all. Enemy to none: Forging ahead and enhancing innovation and productivity in the adversity of sanctions’.

The country’s anti-sanctions campaign comes at a time when the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Alena Douhan, is in Zimbabwe on a 10-day fact-finding mission.

Douhan is a professor of international law at the Belarusian State University in Minsk, and director of the Peace Research Centre and associated member of the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.

Zimbabwe’s Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary affairs, Ziyambi Ziyambi, told the state media over the weekend that the government shared with Douhan its position paper detailing how the sanctions had set off a two-decade-long economic decline, wreaking havoc in the higher education sector, resulting in graduates without jobs and triggering brain drain.

“You will notice that, prior to the imposition of sanctions, the informal sector employed 490,000 people annually, but this number has increased to 1,65 million.

“This shows that there are high levels of underemployment and a lack of decent work, given that many people with degrees are not in formal employment,” Ziyambi said. “This has also seen an increase in emigration of active people, especially those with critical skills.”

Health sector hit the hardest

According to the government, the health sector is among the hardest hit by the brain drain. According to a cabinet statement released in early October 2021, a ministerial committee had been established to find ways of stemming the brain drain in the health sector.

Among the immediate issues, it was tasked with addressing the remuneration of tutors at nursing training colleges and improving the administration of nurses’ training colleges.

With the sanctions biting hard, the brain drain at Zimbabwe’s institutions reached a crescendo in 2008 when Zimbabwe’s inflation reached 2.3 million percent, the world’s highest, culminating in the University of Zimbabwe’s being left with less than half of its required staff.

By that time, the university had fewer than 500 of the required 1,200 lecturers, forcing the institution to halt enrolment in some programmes, particularly sciences, and, in 2010, due to the shortage of lecturers, the university did not enrol any first-year students.

Of the 211 lecturers required in the faculty of science, only 32 remained after the others either entered the private sector or crossed the country’s borders.