In trying to develop our backward country, we are confronted with arduous tasks and our knowledge and experience is far from adequate.

So we must be good at learning. This means we have to pay a lot of attention to our education system. Conditions are changing all the time and to adapt one's thinking to the new conditions, one must study or educate oneself in one way or another. We must learn what we do not know.

A good part of our national revenues must be spent on the so-called unproductive investment in education. As education minister Dr Brian Chituwo has correctly observed, it is impossible to develop without education, without educated people. It may be possible for a country to have a lot of money without educated people but it is impossible still to develop without an educated citizenry.

We say this because a country can have money collected from taxing transnational corporations that are mining and exporting our minerals but without developing the country. In fact, this happened to us. How much of what the British South African Company gained from our minerals was invested in our education. This was a rich country with uneducated and poor people. Colonialism despite extracting our minerals and making gigantic profits from them, left us illiterate and poor - with no schools, not even a university or other meaningful infrastructure needed to develop a country.

It is impossible in today's world to develop a country without investing heavily in education. The progress that we have witnessed in south east Asia is a result of high investment in education. All of the tiger economies prioritised education.
Even the high economic growth rates that we are today witnessing in China, India, Vietnam and Cuba, among others, are as a result of their paying a lot of attention to education. It is also evident now that foreign investment tends to go where there is a highly educated workforce.

It cannot be over emphasised that education is a vital component of any society, especially one that aspires to be democratic. Citizens who are not educated or those with low education are very easy to manipulate, deceive, abuse and humiliate. It is not easy to manipulate, deceive, abuse or humiliate an educated citizenry. One may succeed in doing so for a very short time, but they can't be manipulated over a long period of time.

Thomas Jefferson was very right when he said: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never shall be." The objective of education in a society that aspires to be democratic is to produce citizens who are independent, questioning and analytical in their outlook.
Let us not forget that people may be born with an appetite for personal freedom, but they are not born with knowledge about the scientific, social, political and economic arrangements that make freedom possible over time for themselves and their children. Such things must be acquired through education. They must be learned. And also, let's not forget that education transmits values, intended or not. Education enables democracy to flourish.
It is therefore very important that adequate resources are allocated to all levels of education in our country. Good kindergarten or nursery is very important to the development of a child and deserves the necessary attention from the government. Good primary education is also of vital importance and deserves equal attention. Our secondary schools need more resources than they are currently receiving; so do our colleges and universities.

And although greater attention should be paid to the education of our young people, no adult should be denied the chance to study and improve their educational levels and the government should facilitate this and make it possible.

It would seem at the moment there is so much talk about primary school education and very little attention is being paid to higher education. Why is this so? It is simply because this is the area in which donors have interest. They are not much interested in university or other higher education establishments. And it would seem that whatever donors are interested in becomes a priority, the most important thing and everything else is subordinated to that.

But we know very well that there is very little development a country can achieve with a population predominantly comprising of grade seven dropouts. Primary school education was what the colonialists used to consider important for us. It was what they thought we needed to be, good labourers and petty clerks here and there.

But we are no longer colonial subjects. Our people today are performing the most difficult and challenging tasks in our country. We are no longer supposed to be the governed but the governors. The sons and daughters of our people today are the ones who are supposed to be running the affairs of the state and government - governing the country politically and making economic decisions.

But today, in the 21st century, we have councillors and other political leaders who can hardly read or write, making decisions for us in this highly complex world characterised by neo-liberal globalisation. We are not in any way insulting this semi-literate leadership of ours. We are merely stating facts and pointing the way to the future and hoping in the future all our people will have the opportunity to reach twelfth grade.

The danger of a country being dominated by low education standards is that there is no motivation even for those with good education to think and act in line with their levels of education. There is no motivation for them to do so, they are in fact, more comfortable behaving like they never went to school. They actually become functional illiterates.

But what does this mean for society, for the nation? It means stagnation or moving backwards in very long strides. And this is the character of our politics today where even the educated think and act like illiterates.

We therefore urge Dr Chituwo and his colleagues to start working seriously on a more progressive national education policy - a policy that will give our people the education they need to function - to effectively and meaningfully engage the world of the 21st century. We can no longer do with labourer education levels that the colonialists left us and would like us to continue with. We want thousands and millions of our people to have meaningful access to higher education so that they can compete in a more efficient and effective way with other citizens of this highly globalised world. Bantustan type of education will not do.

Abolish user fees in hospitals

HEALTH minister Sylvia Masebo's progressive thinking over the need to do away with user fees in hospitals deserves support.

Looking at the socio-economic statistics of our country where more than three-quarters of the population is surrounded by poverty, it is actually cruel to ask poor Zambians to pay user fees for medical care when they struggle to have a single meal each day.

The policy by the government to ask people, regardless of their socio-economic condition, is rather absurd if the health of citizens of this country is on top of the list of its priorities.

Like Masebo has rightly observed, this kind of policy marginalises the poor and it negatively impacts on them.

The consequences of a poor health care system do not need more emphasis. We do not need to remind the government of the dangers of not attending to the needs of those who are affected by disease - those who need medical care.

If the government is truly convinced that the health of Zambians is crucial to the development of their country, it is our humble opinion that user fees must be done away with in the public sector. We believe that access to the public health system is the right of all Zambians, who themselves contribute to government revenue. This does not mean that those who do not pay taxes, if there are any, are not entitled to medical care. Far from it. The government has a responsibility to take care of the health needs of the people. The government cannot abandon its responsibility of ensuring that the health care needs of the citizens of this country are well taken care of.

Yes, the government can shirk some of its responsibilities, but we are afraid that it cannot do so for critical sectors like health and education. We know that the private sector could play an important role in the health sector, but we believe that the public health system should be the backbone of health services in the country, which should provide free health care to citizens. Otherwise the lives of the citizens would be at risk.

In the first place, we do not believe that the user fee policy in the country is functioning. There is evidence from several studies and media reports to the contrary, indicating that pregnant women and thes rural poor are unable to access crucial medical services, although some of these groups are supposedly exempted. There have been reports of critically-ill patients not being attended to because they have not paid user fees. Even when they pay the user fees, in most cases government hospitals do not have adequate supplies of drugs.

This newspaper has on a number of occasions carried reports about medicines and supplies not being available at government hospitals, even if supposedly free. This means that individuals have to buy drugs from private dispensaries even when they would have already paid user fees, rendering the essence of the fees useless.
The policy of one-size-fits-all when it comes to health care should be discouraged. Yes, those who are able to pay for medical care have the right to choose to pay for health services and even seek such services from the private sector. But the majority of the poor who are unable to pay for health services should not be denied health care simply because they cannot pay for it. It is immoral for the government to keep asking for user fees in public hospitals from people who can hardly raise enough money for a square meal.
We do not think that reforming the public health care system only means that patients have to pay for the services they receive from public hospitals.

What we need is the abolition of user fees for key sectors such as health and education, and multilateral donors with imposing but ineffective policies, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should stop making conditions on such important matters.

When looking at issues of cost sharing, we should look at it much more broadly and holistically than a narrow perspective of trying to make savings at the expense of the health of citizens.
Rather than demand money from citizens who are not in employment, people who survive on less than K5,000 per day, the government can come up with better policies in trying to improve the health sector and therefore health delivery to the people. Instead of asking poor people to pay for medical care, we are asking the government to devise more innovative strategies to generate revenue so that it helps to increase the money that government has to spend. The problem is that the revenue base of the government is looking primarily at traditional sources of revenue. We have not heard much about the special tax measures that were introduced on interest earnings for bank account holders. Has this revenue measure worked in improving the health system in the country? Someone owes us an answer.

It is our hope that Masebo will quickly move ahead with her progressive thinking and do something about user fees. The user fees in hospitals or clinics need to be abolished because they are actually an obstacle to the improvement of health care in the country.
We need to do away with user fees in our hospitals if we have to protect life or if we need to improve the health of the citizens of our country.

Health care for the people needs special attention because it is one of the major factors with significant impact on the living conditions of the population.


http://www.post.co.zm/post-read_arti...articleId=1650

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