Author: TSA Press

We note with concern the lack of gender balance in key government positions following the appointment of permanent secretaries and the cabinet reshuffle on 6 and 8 November 2019 by President Emmerson Mnangagwa. This has lowered women’s representation in cabinet from 29% soon after the 2018 elections to 24% presently.

Earlier this month the cabinet approved the amendment of section 124 (1) (b) of the Constitution to extend the women’s quota provided for at national level for 10 more years. The amendment excludes local government – a critical omission. In the 2018 elections women’s representation in local government slid from 16% to 14%: a far cry from the provisions of the Constitution as well as the Southern African Protocol on Gender and Development.

“Section 17 of the Constitution should certainly apply to women at the local level, which is the training ground for women in politics,” noted GL country manager Priscilla Maposa. “Since 2013 the Women in Local Government Forum has been lobbying for the inclusion of local government in Temporary Special Measures to ensure gender parity by 2030, the deadline of the Sustainable Development Goals.” Goal 5 of the SDGs calls for women’s “equal and effective” representation in all areas of decision-making.

With regard to parliament, although the extension of the existing quota is well-intentioned, it overlooks some critical concerns. “We must avoid more of the same when there is the opportunity to do better,” noted GL CEO Colleen Lowe Morna, and member of the SADC Gender and Elections team that visited Zimbabwe in June under the auspices of the Zimbabwe Gender Commission. Women currently constitute 31% of members of parliament, just above the 30% seats that are reserved for women on a PR basis. “We need to ask why women are not progressing beyond these minimum requirements,” Lowe-Morna noted.

There are two main types of political system. In the First Past the Post (FPTP) or “winner takes all system” individuals run as candidates for the party. Candidates with the largest number of votes win. In the PR system, parties put up a list of candidates in rank order. They are allocated seats according to the percentage of the vote that each party wins. Evidence from the SADC region shows that women perform much better in the PR system (especially where this is accompanied by a gender quota) than in the FPTP system.

In Zimbabwe, local elections are run entirely on a FPTP basis. The House of Assembly has a mixed system. Women and men are free to contest the FPTP elections. Sixty seats are reserved for women only and distributed on a PR basis. In the senate, seats are distributed on a PR basis for both women and men.

The SADC Gender and Elections Mission proposed that Zimbabwe learn from the senate, where PR seats are allocated to women and men equally on a PR basis, resulting in 48% women in the senate. The mission argued that reserving seats for women (whether PR or First Past the Post) is not the best way of going about gender quotas. It argued for the retention of the mixed system at national level, with a 50% quota applied to both to the PR seats (using the one woman, one man, “zebra” system) and FPTP seats (with all parties being obliged to field an equal number of women and men candidates).

As illustrated in the case of the senate, this method is watertight for the PR seats. For the FPTP seats, there is no guarantee that the 50% women candidates (even when fielded by all parties) will win their seats. However, if having a critical mass of women candidates is accompanied by political commitment, public education and awareness, there is evidence to show that women’s representation will also increase in the FPTP seats.

At the local level, although the FPTP system is not the most favourable for women’s representation, there is a strong lobby in favour of this system because at this level that deals with daily service delivery issues voters want to be able to access their political representative. The SADC Gender and Elections Mission argued for a 50% quota for candidates of all political parties at the local level.

The mission shared the example of Mauritius, where local elections are conducted on a FPTP basis.  In 2013, Mauritius introduced a gender neutral quota at the local level – at least 30% of all candidates must be either women or men. This provision in the local government election act, coupled with political will and commitment, has resulted in a substantial increase in women councillors.

Zimbabwe has the advantage of starting early in debating arrangements for the 2023 elections. It also has the benefit of comparative experience from the region. With only two elections before 2030, GL urges all stakeholders to come up with solutions that will deliver results.

Post published in: Featured

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Boy, am I probably writing on the wrong website to voice this opinion, but your alma mater? Yeah, it doesn’t really matter.

The college admissions scandal that first ripped through the headlines a few months ago has been a source of much-needed schadenfreude for the downtrodden masses out there. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard about this, the gist is that a bunch of B-grade celebrities and other rich people raised kids too dumb to succeed on their own, so the parents bought their kids’ way into elite colleges through various types of bribery and outright fraud. Now all those overprivileged wealthy parents are getting their comeuppance. Neat!

In the most recent example of the bloodthirsty crowd cheering as the deposed royals trudge up to the guillotine, a federal judge in Massachusetts handed down the harshest punishment yet among the 13 parents and coaches sentenced so far in the scandal. Well, really it was only six months in prison, a couple years on supervised release, 200 hours of community service, and a $150,000 fine. That’s hardly life-ruining for someone who had $450,000 to blow to get his daughter and son admitted into the University of Southern California as fake athletes. Still, the sentencing judge’s harsh words caught a lot of people’s attention on this one.

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton was quoted in USA Today as saying this parent was no better than a common thief, “because that’s what you are — a thief.”

“Higher education in this country aspires to be a meritocracy,” Judge Gorton went on. “Those who work the hardest or make the best grades rightfully get accepted into the best schools.”

But… do they? I have no problem at all with this guy’s sentence, or the damning words the judge had for him. He is a thief. Still, in reality, if you look at actual research and shelve 350 years of Harvard marketing, what this guy stole — two seats at USC — wasn’t worth very much to begin with, and the students who lost them probably ended up doing just fine anyway.

A famous paper by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published in November 2002 by the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that after adjusting for student characteristics, like standardized test scores, the income benefits from going to a very selective institution of higher learning were “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” A 2017 study called Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility found that although there was not much difference for more affluent students, lower-income students who went to a truly elite school did have a better chance of reaching the top one percent than their comparable peers at good public universities. But the fact that the more affluent students were sitting in the same classes as the less affluent ones and realized no benefit compared to their peers at public institutions shows that the benefit for lower-income students likely was not any difference in the quality of teaching at the elite institutions. Rather, the more affluent students already had good enough networks in place to help them reach the top of the income distribution, whereas the lower- cincome students had to find an elite network through an elite school to reach the top one percent.

So, to state it in non-economist speak, the quality of the school doesn’t matter, the quality of the student does. Elite schools aren’t teaching people any better than reasonably good non-elite schools. While elite schools perhaps provide some networking benefits to people from less affluent backgrounds (at least those who want to reach the top one percent), mostly the elite schools are just attracting more of the students who would do well wherever they went.

Still need an anecdote to convince you? I went to Truman State University for my undergraduate education, and the University of St. Thomas School of Law for law school, and I have more saved than this elite law school graduate everyone freaked out about last month who subsists on beans. And, you know, I’m two years younger and enjoy the occasional New York strip.

My dad certainly wasn’t going to be buying my way into USC, or anywhere else, after his 30 years of laying carpet, two busted knees, and another 15 years working as a public-school custodian. And he didn’t have to. Because him and my mom did the harder work of raising someone who doesn’t need his parents to bribe his way through life.

So, if you ask me, the real victims of the college admissions scandal aren’t the kids who didn’t get into USC. Those bright young people will do just fine anyway. The real victims are the kids of the cheating parents. They’ll be comfortable in life materially. Yet, it’s a special kind of psychological hell to have no choice but to ride your parents’ coattails all the way to the grave.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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Over the course of my career, I have worked at a number of law firms, both big and small. Although I recently opened up my own shop, I have prior experience as an associate at firms that offered an array of job perks and other incentives. Even though firms may think that job perks increase morale, my experiences demonstrate that the best way to motivate attorneys is to simply pay them more money.

One common perk at firms is free food, and several of the firms at which I worked offered free food to attorneys and staff. This job perk was apparently provided to boost morale and show associates that the partners cared about their employees. One of the small shops I worked at had bagels and pastries every Friday, and this was a welcome treat. The bagels were from a pretty awesome New York City bagel shop, so the food definitely met my standards. I regularly had two or even three bagels when they were offered on Fridays, since that firm paid associates low salaries, and I wanted to make up for the income gap by consuming free food! In addition, the firm had happy hours after work on most Fridays, and they would buy premium beer and snacks for attorneys at the office. Again, I had my fill of the free drinks and snacks in order to make up for my low salary at this firm.

However, the real issue with morale at that shop was compensation. The firm did not offer bonuses when I was there, and this was a sore subject among associates. In addition, the firm did not reimburse associates for bar dues, CLE expenses, and other costs associated with being an attorney. Of course, the firm probably didn’t spend an exorbitant amount of money on free bagels, snacks, and drinks, but this cash might have been enough to pay the bar dues of attorneys in the office. Paying for this expense or boosting compensation could have greatly impacted morale, and firm management should have considered doing this other than offering smaller job perks.

Sometimes, offering free food or other perks can actually backfire on partners. I once worked at another shop where the firm provided free pizza to associates on Fridays. This would have been a great treat, but office management regularly ordered pizza from the worst pizza shop in the entire city where we worked. I have absolutely no idea why we ordered pizza from this place — maybe the officer manager was getting a kickback for our order, or maybe the pizza was just super cheap. The complaints got so bad that we later alternated between this bad pizza place and a decent pizza shop that made pizza I didn’t need to pour garlic powder on to make palatable.

However, this compromise actually hurt morale at the office! The associates began referring to days we got pizza from the crappy shop as a “bad pizza day” and days we got pizza from the good pizza shop as a “good pizza day.” Whenever we complained about the food situation, or once suggested that we get healthier options every now and then, office management threatened to cancel pizza day entirely. This whole situation affected morale, since not considering our protests about the pizza selection proved that there was dysfunctional management in the office.

One of the biggest gripes at that shop was that nonlawyers had immense power over the attorneys, and the office manager controlling where we got pizza played into this narrative. Whenever there was a “bad pizza day,” we would regularly have tons of pizza left over that would be thrown out, since few people (except for cheapos like myself) were interested in wasting calories on the crappy pizza. If firm management devoted resources to compensation, instead of pizza days, I bet they could have better incentivized associates and avoided the office politics that came along with Pizza Fridays.

Another job perk that many firms provide to associates is swag with the firm’s logo on it. I’m not talking about pens, note pads, and other chotchkies that no one would ever consider to be a job perk. Rather, I’m talking about the more substantive items that firms provide to associates in order to both promote their brand and provide a gift to attorneys.

I have seen some amazing firm swag over the years. Probably the coolest item I’ve ever seen was a pretty sweet smartphone speaker dock with a top firm’s name emblazoned on the front. However, most of the time, firms are lazy with swag, and these items don’t really provide value to attorneys.

I once worked at a firm that went crazy with swag, and gave each associate a hat, golf shirt, vest (which made me feel like Marty McFly!), water bottle, water bottle koozie (but people called it a wine bottle koozie), smartphone charger, lunchbag (who would use this — we’re not school kids!), backpack, and probably some other crap I can’t even remember. Of all of these items, only the backpack (an expensive Tumi bag) really provided substantial value to associates. The backpack also helped attorneys protect their firm computers, and I got some nice compliments from other lawyers while wearing this bag. However, if firms do not provide useful swag to attorneys, they should just chuck the swag and pay associates more money. This will have a much greater impact on morale than gifting associates chintzy items.

All told, I understand why firms think they can spend a small sum of money on job perks and swag, and that this relatively minor investment will go a long way toward improving morale. However, the best way to incentivize associates and increase morale at a firm is to simply pay attorneys more money.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Tinashe L. Chimedza penned this piece in response to Op-Ed: This is how Zimbabwe has changed since I became president: Emmerson Mnangagwa

Two years ago Zimbabwe’s National Army carried out a putsch that removed President Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Once the coup was carried out Zimbabwe’s parliament began a process of ‘impeaching’ a President who was already under ‘house arrest’. The global spin on that putsch was that this was a ‘military assisted transition’ and there was a global silence to accept this narrative because a lot of people, especially Zimbabweans, were just desperate because of the collapsing economy. South Africa too proved to be a key decision broker and the presence of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans in South Africa swayed the political class there to say ‘anything but Mugabe’ and this was shared by global power especially the British.  It is reported that the British embassy to Zimbabwe played a critical role to ‘package’ the putsch as a ‘military assisted transition’ and the propaganda worked for while.

The world was made to gulp a narrative that there was a ‘democratic’ and ‘legal’ process under way in Zimbabwe. But since then, by any measure, Zimbabwe’s politics and economics have worsened.. The reason is very simple. The men (and few women) who now rule Zimbabwe had stayed so much in the shadow of Mugabe yet they were the real crude power that kept the old man in power and when tried to purge them by firing the Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, they had to strike back to defend their interests.

What happened in the November 2017 was a repeat episode of what happened in the 2008 election when Morgan Tsvangirai won. The military is now firmly in charge of the politics and the economics in Zimbabwe.  The mess that this has created has now cascaded into every facet of Zimbabwe’s political economy and this is happening with disastrous challenges in health, in the economy and the country has descended into almost a military state.

Recently the government announced they were firing hundreds of striking doctors. There has been an impasse for almost two months and the hospitals have become almost death traps with the absence of doctors. For almost two months the medical doctors, the few that are there, have had a long dispute with the government over salaries and conditions in the public hospitals. The crisis became so acute that women are having to go to ‘backyard’ untrained ‘midwives’ to give birth.

Zimbabwe’s referral hospitals, largely built many decades ago, have become almost ghost like places. Whole wards lie abandoned, sometimes citizens have to bring in clean water and some hospitals have said they are closing mortuaries. In Masvingo, 300 km to the south of Harare, women have been giving birth by candle light and sometimes using phone torches as light.  Missionary hospitals can not cope and some have issued statements begging patients not to come and camp outside, sometimes for weeks.  One doctor broke down when interviewed and citizens have to resort to forming independently funded initiatives to support the major hospitals.

Recently the Minister of Finance tabled a proposed budget before the National Assembly. The proposed budget bill shows declining revenue, a contacting economy, foreign aid continues to be significant in the budget and the government has retained an intermediate money transfer tax as a source of revenue. But there is more of the mess. The Parliamentary Public Accounts committee unearthed billions of unexplained expenditure and the response of the Ministry of Finance was to issue a ‘law’ pardoning irregular expenditure, without accounting, over ‘Us$10billion’.  This is an equivalent of almost 3 national budgets.  The public finance system is in shambles and this is deliberate because the central bank then uses a ‘preference’ system to allocate subsidies worth billions to businesses linked to the political elites.

Elsewhere the country’s pension system has almost collapsed and at the centre of that are managers and elites linked to the ruling party with estimates that up to US$5billion has been wiped off from pensions. With the chaos in agriculture and mining Zimbabwe also faces a draught which could have been made manageable by proper policies to boost productivity. State and party elites want to superintend over the latest so called ‘smart agriculture’ input scheme, worth billions, so they can subsidise themselves and find a platform to create patronage. All these schemes, of literally looting the state, has serious consequences on the capacity of the state to transform the economy and set Zimbabwe on a path to prosperity. Inflation has been so bad that the state agency tasked to measure year on year inflation has been banned from publishing that number.  One just has to track the rate of price increases and see how income has collapsed.

While the President has had a great public relations team what is emerging is that the transition in 2017 was a false change.  Zimbabwe actually under military rule and the descent cannot be stopped by opinion pieces but by comprehensive reform.

[i] Tinashe L. Chimedza is a Zimbabwean. He has written for The Elephant, for The East African, for Zimbabwe Briefing and published book chapters and journal papers on Zimbabwe and Southern Africa.

Post published in: Featured

* A New York City attorney has been accused of filing over 300 lawsuits on behalf of two clients who had no idea he was representing them. [New York Post]

* Ben & Jerry’s has been sued for allegedly misleading consumers about claims that its milk is sourced from “happy cows.” Wonder if the cows will get subpoenaed… [USA Today]

* New York has joined California and others in suing Juul, the maker of electronic cigarettes, for allegedly illicit conduct in connection with advertising to minors. [NBC]

* Ja Rule has been dismissed from a class action about the failed Fyre Festival. No need to read the article, there will probably be three documentaries about the lawsuit someday. [Billboard]

* A South African lawyer died in a freak accident this week after she dropped a loaded gun in court. [People]

* A lawyer in Texas has been arrested for returning to the firm that had just axed her and firing a gun. [Dallas Morning News]

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.