Kuzvinetsa Dzvimbo

Career

Kuzvinetsa Peter Dzvimbo served as the first Vice Chancellor of the Zimbabwe Open University and was Rector of the African Virtual University.

Previously he was a Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and Research) of the Vaal University of Technology, South Africa. From March 2009 to July 2011, Prof. Peter Dzvimbo was a Deputy Executive Dean in the College of Human Sciences, then an Executive Dean in the College of Education at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Professor Kuzvinetsa Dzvimbo was a member of the UNESCO international jury on Electronic Learning for five years which met annually in Paris to assess global projects in eLearning.

Prior to his appointment to UNISA, he was a Professor of Education Management and Head of the Department of Education Management at the University of Johannesburg. He became Rector of the African Virtual University (AVU) in Nairobi, Kenya, for four years from the World Bank in Washington, DC where he was a Senior Education Specialist in tertiary education and training.

As Rector of the AVU in Kenya, he worked with almost 60% of the major universities on the African continent in the field of ICTs in education. During that time, he gained valuable experience in working in education development, leadership and management in Francophone Africa (Burundi, DRC, Djibouti, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal), Lusophone (Mozambique) and Anglophone Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia, Nigeria, Somaliland, Swaziland, Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe,). He was responsible for strategic direction and leadership of the AVU and its activities in Africa and its partners in Canada, the USA and Australia.

While in the World Bank, he worked in the fields of strategic planning and management, sector studies, program evaluation and monitoring, ICTs in education, education policy and planning, tertiary education and training, capacity development at national level and teacher education in Ghana, Grenada, Jamaica, Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone, St. Lucia, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago. He also provided sector support to a number of education projects globally.

He was the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Zimbabwe Open University. Prior to that appointment, he was a Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Zimbabwe and a Dean in the Faculty of Education at the same institution for five years. He held teaching positions at the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA); the University of the Witwatersrand (RSA); the Rand Afrikaans University (1995-1998) (RSA); and the School of Basic Studies at Ahmadu Bello University (Nigeria) from 1979-1981. He was a deputy principal of a secondary technical teachers college and trained primary school teachers through open and distance learning in Zimbabwe during the early 1980s. His first teaching career was as a secondary school teacher in Freetown, Sierra Lone in 1977.

In December 2018, he was appointed Zimche chief executive replacing Professor Emmanuel Ngara. He is a member of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education Governing Board.^[1][3][2]

Controversies

Professor Dzvimbo elevated Florence Chimbumu in 2020 from an administrator to chief operations officer in a restructuring exercise. It was discovered that Chimbumu had just one O Level pass and the Higher Education Examination Council (Hexco) dismissed her tertiary qualifications as fake. She was caught out by the Zimche internal auditor who did the checks normally done before hiring by human resources officers.^[4]

Unapproved Hotel Meals

In June 2019, The Herald reported that Dzvimbo was spending US$84 000 monthly on hotel meals. In a recorded telephone interview, Professor Dzvimbo confirmed the development. On one occasion early in January 2019, Zimche spent $7 000 on hotel breakfast, lunches and drinks ordered from a top-rated Harare hotel.

He defended his position saying it was a way of motivating employees who work overtime. Dzvimbo said:

"We do that to our staff where they have extra work. We usually do that on Saturdays and Sundays when they work overtime because Government no longer pays."

Asked on whether the decision was sanctioned by the Zimche board, Prof Dzvimbo said:

"These are some of the things that we will have to tell the board later."

In the same report The Herald also disclosed that Prof Dzvimbo received an iPhone worth nearly US$4 000 after approval by the Zimche board council.

This was despite the fact that Zimche workers did not have laptops.^[1]

References