Costly foreign education for Ministers’ kids ..while Zim kids sent home

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BY GIFT PHIRI

HARARE – Zimbabwe’s cabinet ministers could be fleecing the treasury of millions of dollars in scarce foreign currency to educate their children at expensive colleges abroad while government is at loggerheads with local private schools over fee-capping legislation.
Amid this “grotesque extravagance,” hundreds of children from poor families on the other hand have dropped out of school for failing to raise the fees.
Several ministers are spending more than 100 times their annual salaries on tuition and residence fees for children enrolled at prestigious universities in Western capitals such as Harvard, Washington DC University, George Washington, Wolverhampton and Birmingham University, among others.
The Zimbabwean can reveal that Rural Housing and Social Amenities minister Emmerson Mnangagwa has a child, Chido, at Midlands College in Texas in the US where fees start at about US$24,000 a year (Z$38 million revalued). His daughter Chipo studied at Varsity College in Cape Town, South Africa and his son studied and is now living in UK.
Education minister Aeneas Chigwedere, is frantically trying to control fees at private schools in Zimbabwe supposedly because they are “charging exorbitant fees.”
And yet, at Harvard, where his child Pride studied the minister was forking out about US$42,000 (Z$67 million revalued) a year. Zimbabwean ministers earn an estimated Z$350,000 a year and under the country’s anti-money laundering laws individuals are barred from stocking foreign currency.
Mines minister Amos Midzi, who is spearheading the illegal takeover of foreign-owned mines, has a child, Tendai at George Washington University in the US.
Minister of Science and Technology in President Mugabe’s Office, Olivia Muchena, has a son, Kudzai, at Sunway College in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Higher Education minister Stan Mudenge has a son, Stan (Jnr) studying at the University of Washington DC.
Defence minister Sydney Sekeramayi’s son studied medicine in Canada and now practises there. His daughter, Maggie Ambayi, is currently studying there. Health and Child Welfare minister David Parirenyatwa’s son, Jeff, is studying in Australia. Parirenyatwa had another son at Durham University in Britain.
Simbarashe Mumbengegwi (Foreign Affairs), Herbert Murerwa (Finance), Elliot Manyika (Minister Without Portfolio), John Nkomo (Speaker), Patrick Chinamasa (Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs) and Oppah Muchinguri (Gender) all have or had children at finishing schools or universities in Britain and America.
Political analysts said ministers were “trying to pull wool over our eyes” that they cared about the affordability of education to citizens when they were fleecing the treasury to finance their children’s tuition in forex.
The minimum wage for domestic workers in Zimbabwe is Z$8,000 a month and factory workers earn between Z$15,000 and Z$60,000 a month. Primary school fees start at Z$2,500 per term. Secondary education costs more than double.


Schools re-named

HARARE - Zimbabwe’s main opposition, the MDC, has scoffed at government’s “double standards” in renaming hundreds of schools, formerly with British names, after the country’s national heroes when ministers were surreptitiously sending their children to foreign schools.
Many private schools have over the past few months been renamed to honour liberation “heroes” and government figures from Zimbabwe in what has been described by critics as “an apparent bid by President Mugabe to pander to anti-colonialist sentiment.”
Among some of the prominent schools whose names have been changed is Harare-based Prince Edward High School, which has been re-christened Murenga Boys High, after a leader of an uprising against colonial settlers a century ago.
A girls’ school named after Queen Elizabeth has also been changed to the Sally Mugabe Girls High after President Mugabe’s first wife who died of kidney failure in 1992.
Other figures from British royalty and the colonial era, including British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence, have also been replaced. – Own correspondent