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National law and policies on fee or for free – Chad

It matters if the state provides education for free or charges fees. Every state in the world has signed up to at least one international treaty obliging it to making primary education free and compulsory, and secondary education progressively so. But education cannot be compulsory if it is not also free and this contradiction is too often ignored. Furthermore, what does free actually mean in a world with numerous overt and hidden costs, to learners, parents, local communities? In a 2006 survey by Katarina Tomasevski education was found not to be genuinely free in the vast majority of countries in the world. The quote below on your country (if information was available) is from this very important survey.

 

The national laws and policies are the applications of the constitution, yet may actually be more advanced than this, as they are generally redrawn or updated more frequently than constitutions are. Laws are made by the government, the parliamentarians, and the bureaucrats, often in consultation with civil society. However, this also leaves them open to vulnerability and retrogression as they can become instruments of short-term politics and priorities. Laws and policies are open to change and influence through the routes of the democratic process and civil society campaigns. And where possible their violations should be challenged, either through the courts or through judicial review.

 

The state is the central actor in any claim to the right to education: it is the prime duty-bearer and the prime implementer; it is the guarantor; and it is the state´s signature vis-à-vis the international norms and standards which binds it to respect, protect and fulfil the right to education. The state must therefore be judged or challenged on its central text on the right to education, whether this be the constitution, the laws or the policies.

The poor are defined in Chad as “people with no possessions who cannot enrol their children in school”. Despite a constitutional guarantee whereby education provided by the state should be free, the government acknowledged in 1996 that in practice “the pupils’ parents bore 70% of the cost of education”. Moreover, 15% of schools are ‘spontaneous’, established and financed by communities to remedy the government’s neglect of education. Adoum Mbaïosso claimed in 1990 that more than 90% of Chad’s population was illiterate and that school was “a social niche for the privileged in the ocean of the illiterates”. To extend the reach of education, people have had to establish and finance schools themselves. 

Despite prospects of oil wealth in Chad, the constitutional guarantee of free education is unlikely to be translated into reality. A World Bank-designed arrangement for  channelling oil wealth into poverty reduction collapsed when the government changed its policy in December 2005, having decided to allocate oil revenues to state security as the priority sector. 

The forthcoming oil wealth was to be allocated to poverty alleviation and the scheme for doing so was supposed to constitute a World Bank’s ‘best practice’ model. A special Monitoring and Control Commission for Oil Revenue (Collège de contrôle et de surveillance des revenues pétroliers) was created. Its first report, in July 2005, came two years after oil had started flowing and contributing 40% of the government’s budget. Funds for poverty reduction, in which education was identified as one of the principal beneficiaries, should have become available. This was not the case and the Commission’s findings made the World Bank “very concerned”. 

Urbain Moyombaye has said: ”I want to tell the World Bank that all the publicity they made around this project has amounted to nothing”. Indeed, the World Bank has implicitly acknowledged that this was so and pulled out. 

Commercial exploitation of oil became feasible through vast foreign investments in the late 1990s and the export of oil through Chad-Cameroon pipeline started in July 2003. This altered what had previously been known as ‘the Chad rule’, that is, global silence on the human rights situation in poor African non-English-speaking countries. The interest for Chad triggered by its oil wealth is not likely to benefit human rights, however. Chad was placed on the United Nations human rights agenda in 2003, on the eve of the completion of the oil pipeline and immediately taken off. 

Questions relating to the use of Chad’s oil wealth have been placed on the international agenda but, as yet, remain unanswered. The priority of the US government seems to be continued military support to the government of Chad, justified by the threat of terrorism. The continued French military support is justified by preventing a spill-over of the crisis in the neighbouring Darfour. Oil may well be in the background in both cases. 

Oil wealth has not made a visible difference in the government’s conduct, notably its obligation to pay its own employees. The government noted in 1997 that “difficulties in paying civil servants regularly reduce the chances of completing a normal school year and undermines the willingness of State employees to collaborate in implementing the programme”. This continued into 2005, and triggered strikes by unpaid public employees, including teachers. Amongst the unpaid or poorly paid civil servants, temptations of oil wealth may have been too hard to resist, hence widespread corruption. The Ministry of Education has estimated that only 38% of the funds budgeted for education actually reach schools.