The global rush of nations to acquire enviable GDPs and middle income status for their people are not the only things Africa as a continent is grappling with. There are also things she is struggling to rid herself of. The formal education system is one of such heirlooms. Regularly perceived as a “recycle bin for Western ideas,” the system has withstood the toughest activist pressure and demand for reform and still remains in denial of change. Africa’s challenges include but are not limited to poverty, the HIV scourge, high donor dependency, war and conflict and poor governance. The issue is, somehow, all these challenges usually end up holding the education system accountable for their misgivings. The story of a teenage pregnancy in several African countries is not just about the unfortunate circumstances of a 14 year old girl. It always ends up as a motivation for the proposed Keep Girls In School policy or bill. The investigative story of a corruption syndicate is not just about the ethical deficiency in the civil service. It will rather make front-page headlines as a pretext for a moral-vigorous teaching module on the curriculum. Even when the MPs stutter while taking their oaths into parliament, the public has fallen into the norm of asking, “what school did he go to?” For the layman, a formal education is a long term preparation for exams. Many parents actually look to no more than the acquisition of a degree in whatever respectable trade there may be. Historically, the system itself was a creation for the economic convenience of the European masters. While the French’s objective was to make Africans Frenchmen in bblack skin, the British preferred skilling submissive natives in filling the gap of human resource. However, as we might observe, these differences in method were only a matter of preference but the goal remained the same– economic convenience and dominance. It is arguable that the natives’ first foreign language was religion. This was because learning how to read in a foreign European language would ease the hymns and the evangelical recitations rolling off their native tongues. The same could be said of the nature of the curriculum which produced more menial workers and thus its primacy on basic numeracy and literacy. (let alone the fact that religion was a behavioural sedative) But what about today? For whose convenience, what purpose, what goal is the education system serving? Other than making clones of readily available-out-of-work professionals, what more is there to it? The issue of large youth unemployment has never been a more sound point for political correctness than now. Several governments say their 50 year vision will deliver what every youth desires. The opposition tells the youths that the only chance they have at taking their place in government is by electing them. Either way the youth seem oblivious to the fact that they won’t be youths in 40 years. Today, many African republics celebrate Universal Primary and Secondary Education schemes like it is a native-made-rocket launched into space. The realities of the children going to these schools are however barely taken into account and yet the policymakers claim that the project is aimed at promoting equality in education access. With almost 25 years since the program’s establishment, I am quite weary that continuous funding into expanding a broken system is going to do us any good. In respect of context, the regime turnover in Africa is higher than elsewhere on the globe and so by implication, the reforms that come subsequent with the political change. The education regime has despite these changes insisted on remaining the same. The universities today still graduate thousands of clerks who believe the only place for an educated person is a job placement in the civil service. This deadlock is quite aptly captured by Kagayi Ngobi’s poem, In 2065 when he says that: The syllabus will be the same shadow of what colonialists left behind With systems too archaic and too alien to offer anything new And the students will remain cabbages and potatoes And the ratio of the jobless to the job-hopeful Will remain nine to one At the end of it all, when we have produced thousands of cabbages and potatoes, many of whom will languish in unemployment, all fingers will turn towards the system yet the system is delivering perfectly on demand. They will blame it for its failure to turn rubble into pearls yet they well know that the basic concept of Computer Systems is Garbage in, Garbage out and sometimes the system is the garbage! Patrick Karekezi is passionate about using data to give people power to inform development policy. Twitter: @pro_youngpeople Email: pkarekezi1@gmail.com
