By Etiwel Mutero
The address by the Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, Professor Torerai Moyo, at the closing ceremony of the National Education Summit Zimbabwe 2026, highlights a profound contradiction at the heart of the country’s educational governance.
While the Minister rightly observed that education is a fundamental human right enshrined in Section 75 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, his subsequent remarks regarding parental obligations and the weaponisation of school fees expose a troubling willingness to shift the state’s constitutional burden onto the shoulders of ordinary citizens.
The Minister’s policy position is not only practically flawed, but it directly conflicts with the Education Amendment Act and the supreme law of the land.
The core tension in Zimbabwe’s education sector lies in the clash between high-minded constitutional declarations and practical, daily statutory regulations. Section 75 of the Constitution explicitly states that every citizen and permanent resident has a right to a basic State-funded education.
The Education Amendment Act aligned with this by defining basic state-funded education from Early Childhood Development up to Form 4, explicitly stating that for these categories, pupils shall not be required to pay fees or levies. However, because the state has not fully assumed the cost of universal free education due to resource constraints, the operational reality is governed by subsidiary legislation.
Statutory Instrument 240 of 2023 explicitly gazetted tuition fees for government schools, breaking down tuition fees into specific tiers for low-density, high-density, and rural schools. While the primary Act and the Constitution promise a state-funded system, this statutory instrument legally mandates that tuition fees are still alive, active, and expected to be paid by users of the system unless they are covered by a state assistance program.
Minister Moyo strongly asserted that the constitutional guarantee to access education was being abused by parents who have the financial means but willfully refuse to pay school fees. He went so far as to demand a practical framework to penalize these parents. This rhetoric deliberately misinterprets the nature of a constitutional right.
Section 75 of the Constitution does not state that citizens have a right to education if their parents pay for it; it states explicitly that every citizen and permanent resident has a right to a basic State-funded education. By passing the Education Amendment Act, the legislature aligned statutory law with this mandate, declaring that from ECD to Form 4, pupils are not required to pay tuition fees or levies.
To bridge the operational gap until full state funding is realized, the government gazetted highly specific, layered tuition fees under Statutory Instrument 240 of 2023.
While these fees remain technically active under subsidiary legislation, the Minister’s threat to deal decisively with defaulting parents creates a dangerous legal paradox. Over a decade of binding High Court and Supreme Court precedents establishes that the right to education belongs exclusively to the child.
A school cannot legally exclude a learner or withhold results based on parental default. To bypass this, the Ministry has previously authorized School Development Committees to unleash commercial debt collectors upon families. This debt-collector framework directly contradicts Section 75. It transforms a sacred, state-funded human right into a hostile, commercial debt relationship, effectively criminalizing poverty.
The Minister’s renewed push for punitive frameworks against parents is a regression; a statutory instrument or ministerial directive cannot override a constitutional mandate. The state cannot punish parents for failing to fund a service that the Constitution explicitly orders the State to fund.
The Minister’s remarks regarding the Basic Education Assistance Module further expose the structural rot within the state’s educational safety net. Professor Moyo lamented that affluent citizens, including miners, commercial farmers, and cross-border traders, are corruptly placing their children on BEAM, placing schools under severe strain when disbursements are delayed.
While the Minister is correct that this corruption requires a rigorous, biometric audit to weed out undeserving beneficiaries, his characterization of delayed payments as an operational strain minimizes a grave constitutional violation.
When the state delays BEAM disbursements, sometimes for multiple terms or years, it is not a minor administrative hiccup; it is a functional denial of the right to a basic education. In many rural schools, where up to 80% of learners rely on BEAM, these delays freeze all school operations. Learning materials vanish, infrastructure crumbles, and clean water is cut off. While children technically remain in the classroom to satisfy non-exclusion policies, they are being starved of an actual education.
Furthermore, this operational paralysis renders BEAM highly discriminatory in practice under Section 75. While Section 56 of the Constitution allows for lawful differentiation to assist vulnerable groups, the systemic underfunding and corruption of BEAM create an unconstitutional, class-based divide. Children in wealthy urban centers benefit from parental resources, while poor, rural learners are trapped in dying, state-dependent schools.
The most tragic element of the Minister’s plea for parental payments is that it is mathematically unnecessary. The money required to fund universal basic education is already inside the national budget. For the 2026 financial year, the government allocated ZWG 5.58 billion to BEAM, which converts to approximately US219.9 million.
Spread evenly across Zimbabwe’s 3.9 million learners from ECD to Form 4, this allocation yields over US56 per child, per year. This comfortably exceeds the estimated US$50 per child required to cover standard tuition, textbooks, and basic learning materials.
The crisis is not a shortage of cash, but a failure of design and execution. Because BEAM remains a targeted safety net rather than a universal per-pupil grant, it creates massive bureaucratic bottlenecks. Funds are delayed as they flow from the Treasury, through the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, down to the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, and finally to schools.
The path forward requires transforming BEAM from a flawed welfare program into a Universal Per-Pupil Capitation Grant. By making every single child in a public school eligible, the state completely eliminates the administrative cost of screening, eradicates the social stigma attached to BEAM, and prevents affluent gatekeepers from hijacking the fund.
Crucially, the Treasury must disburse these funds directly into individual school bank accounts at the start of every term. If the US$219.9 million already allocated were moved transparently and directly, daily tuition fees and basic levies would become instantly obsolete across Zimbabwe.
Minister Moyo highlighted a real crisis regarding early childhood infrastructure, noting that four-year-old children in rural areas are walking up to five kilometers to access schooling. He noted that the Minister of Finance has promised funding for ECD infrastructure starting this term.
However, relying on ad-hoc, discretionary treasury promises or local parental levies will not solve a systemic infrastructure deficit. To build school blocks, laboratories, and local ECD centers closer to communities within three to five years, the government must implement robust, alternative macroeconomic financing measures.
As a global titan in gold, platinum, and lithium production, Zimbabwe should modestly increase mineral royalties and legally ring-fence 20% of that revenue into a Free Education Capital Fund. Earmarking a portion of the Intermediated Money Transfer Tax or expanding sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco would create massive, stable revenue streams dedicated solely to brick-and-mortar educational projects.
To stop public funds from evaporating, the state must emulate countries like Uganda by publishing all school capital allocations across national media. School Development Committees must be granted binding, legal auditing powers over capital accounts, and biometric payrolls must be enforced to eliminate ghost workers, freeing up millions in lost revenue.
Furthermore, large telecommunications, mining, and agricultural corporations should be granted clear tax credits in exchange for directly building classroom blocks or installing solar grids, splitting the infrastructure burden cleanly with the state.
The government can also ease fiscal pressure by prioritizing infrastructure grants for rural and low-income urban primary schools during the first two years before scaling up, funding this by ending costly vacancies or bailouts for bleeding parastatals and eliminating easily abused, untargeted agricultural subsidies.
The National Education Summit Zimbabwe must not remain an annual ceremonial ritual of speeches and empty policy formulations. To transform the Minister’s rhetoric into practical justice, the government must adopt a definitive roadmap. The state must instantly cancel all ministerial policies and directives that allow public schools to unleash commercial debt collectors on families, honoring the spirit of Section 75.
Following this, the government must convert the existing BEAM allocation into a universal per-pupil tuition grant disbursed directly from Treasury to school bank accounts, eradicating the need for basic tuition levies.
Finally, the state must introduce legislative amendments to ring-fence mineral royalties and formalize corporate tax credits to aggressively fund the expansion of rural ECD centres and secondary schools.
The legislation is active, the constitutional mandate is absolute, and the necessary funds are already sitting in the state’s coffers.
The government must cease blaming parents for the systemic failures of its own administrative machinery.
What is required now is not more parental punishment, but the political courage to fulfill the promise of a free, state-funded education for every Zimbabwean child.
About the Author: Etiwel Mutero is an archivist, records manager, teacher and a political commentator. You can contact him on +263773614293 or email etiwelm02@gmail.com
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