Toying with madness: Free public secondary education

This week in the National Assembly, Rumphi East member of Parliament (MP) Kamlepo Kalua proposed introduction of free secondary school education in the country. This is on top of the free primary education introduced in 1994 as well as the free tuition and other fees government abolished in public secondary schools. Here we argue that abolishing fees in public secondary schools would further burden the taxpayer besides lowering education standards.  

Let us contextualise Kalua’s proposal. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration abolished tuition fees in public secondary schools on September 25 2018. Towards the tripartite election—on January 1 2019—to be specific, the administration also scrapped the General Purpose Fund and the Textbook Fund which secondary school students were paying. These developments mean that students in public secondary schools now only pay boarding and examination fees, besides other project-specific fees.

Kalua’s proposal to make secondary school education free must, therefore, have meant removing the only fees that are still payable in public secondary schools, namely boarding fees. According to the MP, fees in whatever form is a barrier for needy students to attain secondary school education.

But the legislator’s proposal lacks merit, first and foremost, because the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), now at K200 million, has a bursary component meant to cater for needy students. Kalua should, therefore, have justified why he thinks CDF cannot serve this purpose.

Secondly, and more importantly, abolishing school fees in public secondary schools means someone would still have to pay for it. This someone is none other than the same taxpayer who is already overburdened with funding so many subsidies.

The subsidies include the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP), free drugs and healthcare service in public health facilities, and free primary education introduced by the Bakili Muluzi administration in 1994, free tuition in public secondary schools and other fees that were removed in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

The merits for free primary school education are that it has long been recognised as a primary factor in reducing poverty (Chimombo, 2009:298). Indicators show that education helps advance economic and agricultural productivity for developing countries, along with improving health and reduction in infertility, infant mortality and morbidity rates (Kadzamira and Rose, 2003:501). In 2016, the World Bank recorded that 51.5 percent of Malawi’s population lived in poverty, an increase from the year before (World Bank 2020). Poverty is a response to low productivity in agriculture, and limited opportunities for non-farm activities (ibid.), all problems where education can easily be the solution.

Researchers in the education sector have established that free primary education has compromised quality of education in the country. For example, although the introduction of free primary education increased access to education for children of different socioeconomic backgrounds, the policy faces challenges such as shortage of trained teachers, classrooms, teaching/learning materials. In turn, these have affected quality of education (MacJessie-Mbewe, Samson, 2002).

And so there are lessons to draw from the introduction of free primary school education, one of them being compromised standards of education. Education standards in the country are the lowest in the region after introduction of free primary education in 1994. This is because the policy was introduced without the requisite resources to support it. It, therefore, goes without saying that extending the policy to secondary school education without providing answers to the initial problems that are afflicting the free primary education policy would just be compounding the problems at the higher tier of the education cycle in the country.

Herewith a few issues Kalua and like-minded people need to be reminded about. People should not abdicate their responsibilities to government such as the education of their children.

At a time the country is under pressure to abolish some subsidies such as AIP, we cannot be moving backwards by introducing retrogressive policies such as free education in public secondary schools. Put simply, toying with such an idea is pure madness or naïvity. Government does not have the fiscal space for such.