Zimbabwe: Beyond a School Certificate

About the Book

    This book chronicles how Zimbabwe’s boom educational and health systems unravelled after independence in 1980 and how exuberance gave way to pessimism. The uncomfortable truth about how socialism lost its way and the dramatic reversal of fortune is told. No jobs were created for the school leavers, inflation went up and poverty started to creep in. The 1980s actually laid the foundations for the economic problems Zimbabwe now faces. Trapped in an ideological commitment to socialist enterprises, policy makers permitted accountability to slip, carried co-operatives further than they should have, and pandered to socialist greed with its corrupt tendencies.

    Zimbabwe: Beyond a School Certificate examines the relations between governance and discursive practices in the modern labour market: the role of institutions of learning and skills development, and the brain drain as creative and retrogressive forces in the economy; labour laws and the job market in a critical methodology for organisational research; and the health system and the poverty datum line as a measurement of the dynamics in industrial development.

    This is a genuinely authentic analysis based on statistical data which support the unfolding events in the southern African country. This book is useful for students (and lecturers alike) and donor agencies wanting to know more about Zimbabwe. Organisations helping to fight the HIV pandemic will also find the book a source of information.

About the Author

    Jacob Chikuhwa was exposed to political influence at an early age as his father (c.1879-10 March 1972) used to tell him of the Pioneer Column of 1890. During the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953, Jacob was made to understand the political ideology of the federation.

    During his student days, Jacob heard about the Mau Mau in Kenya. General Dedan Kemathi, who was hanged by the British and Jomo Kenyatta’s exploits in the war against the British, had an impact on Jacob’s political thinking. He understood that although the Gold Coast (later Ghana in 1957) pursued a non-violent process of decolonisation, the armed struggle in Kenya was a justified method of liberation.

    After having been detained by the white minority Rhodesian regime (1964 to 1965) because of his involvement for a democratic Zimbabwe, Jacob Chikuhwa escaped into Zambia in 1966. He secured an Afro-Asian scholarship to study in the former Soviet Union. In 1972 upon completion of his studies, Chikuhwa moved to Sweden.

    Chikuhwa was appointed ZANU Publicity Secretary for Scandinavia, Austria and West German in 1974. This is when he became interested in research on Zimbabwe’s politico-economic development.

    Chikuhwa holds degrees in economics and international relations from the Kiev Institute of National Economy in Ukraine and the University of Stockholm in Sweden. Chikuhwa has lectured on economics and administration.

    After having worked as an economist for over 30 years, Chikuhwa has turned to writing full-time. He is currently working on a book titled Zimbabwe: The End of the First Republic. Besides Zimbabwe: Beyond a School Certificate, Chikuhwa has written Zimbabwe: The Rise to Nationhood, A Crisis of Governance: Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe at the Crossroads, A Cheer for Sanity, A Thought for the Day, Shona Proverbs and Parables and In Communication with the Deceased.