Africa’s Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling

Lydia Polgreen's New York Times piece entitled Africa’s Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling left me wanting to have a one to one talk with her (05/20/07). The article was basically about the crisis faced by Africa's finest universities because of mismanagement, neglect and policies that favor basic education.

If you are from the continent of Africa you know that many of your friends will call you just to ask if you saw this or that story about Africa. You could be from Lesotho and they will ask you to tell them about what happened in Liberia. It keeps me up trying to read ahead, just in case. Sometimes it worries me too. I once called home in a haste after learning from my friend that some rebels had kidnapped some oil workers at home. So it turns out that my friend was really talking about kidnappings in Nigeria, while in fact that month my country Zimbabwe was without oil. Yes, I wished I was Nigerian! Oops, not really actually.

But you cannot blame my friends for thinking that Zimbabwe is Nigeria. I am grateful that every week gives me a different African country to be from! But on a serious note, I sometimes wonder whether my friends have some devine message they are trying to tell us Africans. You know how great inventions like Penicillin were discovered by coincidence? Could it be that coincidence is revealing to us Africans that we should begin to see each other simply as Africans instead of as Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Ghanians, African Americans, e.t.c.? If the Westerners can see that Africa is one country, why can't the Africans- who would benefit from seeing themselves as one people- see that and start working for the betterment of the whole continent as one. On a personal level, may be I could pursuade the government of "Africa" to recognize my efforts representing them in their absence. Boy or boy, God knows the amount of hours I spend telling the other side of the African story that my friends never read in these newspapers be it on AIDS or AID. When misery strikes in the Congo I am Congolese, sometimes I am Nigerian, a change from days when I am South African speaking on AIDS.

And here is the other side of the story. The piece on these crumbling universities was really great. But, I am always struck by the omissions. This material is not immaterial because therein lies the other pieces of the puzzle that will lead us to the truth. The quest for truth has been and is one of humanity's most important preoccupations since the word. And yes, in the beginning was the Word. Word!

Now the word in this article is that " Africa’s best universities are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions. The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty...When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to bail out African governments with their economic reforms — a bitter cocktail that included currency devaluation, opening of markets and privatization — higher education was usually low on the list of priorities.Fighting poverty required basic skills and literacy, not doctoral students. In the mid-1980s nearly a fifth of World Bank’s education spending worldwide went to higher education. A decade later, it had dwindled to just 7 percent."

Of course the story was not one paragraph, but I think the gist of it is all the sentences above. And yes, I have beef! My beef with the story is how it takes the intricate topic such as this and condenses it into a very simple tale of how bad African governments have failed their people. If you read you will get this message because the story simply gives facts without the context that allows any reader or let me say the Western reader to intepret these facts. It is not that I think these governments are doing an amazing job, but it is only that everything that gets written on Africa is often read within the context that our governments are bad and corrupt. This message has been told countless times so that if you ask anyone in any part of the world, their gut feeling is that our poverty is self-inflicted. God if only these people would stop the corruption then Africa would be fine! But is that true? First of all these governments are stealing from a small pot or crumbs- the meat has allready been stripped by the big kahunas.

The article quotes the the Commission for Africa, a British government research organization, asserting that " African universities are in a “state of crisis” and are failing to produce the professionals desperately needed to develop the poorest continent." You don't say! What is the mission of the Commission for Africa- to help Africa?

In dealing with the facts the piece does not talk about the brain drain that has continued unabated in Africa. African governments invest a lot of the little money they have educating nurses, teachers, and doctors, most of whom go abroad leaving their countries with the burden of no return on their investment and crumbling systems of education. There is no continuity in the system, governments invest, invest, and invest, without much returns. You see it is as simple as this in the West. Some of the best medical doctors trained at Harvard stay there to either practice or inform the research needed to advance medicine. New discoveries are made everyday in university hospitals and then they are taken to the laboratories which publish new knowledge that becomes the fountain for the future generation's education. Some doctors and students go and start companies that feed the economy with jobs and new services. Good example is Google founded by university students at Stanford. All along the way, the research, education and economic fruits are supported by the governments and private entities. At the end of the process, the state and country have a return on their investment on education and anyone who has never been to school can also come to Google, Inc, as a janitor to make a living for their family. It is a system! One that is none existent in most of Africa.

Let's talk about Africa for a second. Universities are underfunded as governments are told by the World Bank to cut social spending and use that money to pay back the interest on their loans. Some of these loans were taken by colonial governments to bolster their oppression of the masses. A case in point is South Africa. Today they are still repaying the loans that went to buying tanks and gas to suppress their right to freedom during Apartheid. You also have the World Trade Organization who insist on allowing Western countries to distort markets where Africa has a chance to succeed. World trade is scewed to benefit the West. And it is as simple as this: Africa exports raw materials that the West buys at stupid prices, we import finished products for our industries at a higher cost. The machinery we buy needs to be refurbished time and again and because we have no industries to maintain these machines, we then rely on the West. Consultants fly in and out to maintain our industries at unbelievable costs, so all the money Africa earns flies through the back doors. On trade, the fact that the World Bank encourages all developing countries to produce raw materials such as coffee means that competition for these goods is dog eat dog among poor countries while the West has the luxury of buying these commodities at stupid prices. Then because our industries cannot be sustained by the silly prices, we import these goods and the few business people who have been trying to produce finished goods locally have to compete with cheap goods dumped on our markets. So our business geniuses end up hustling people or selling bananas. Overal, there is no innovation or economic systems to support these individual endeavors. So where should the money to improve schools come from if the basic systems that are supposed to provide for Africa's economic independence are but tributaries that feed into the river flowing to quench the greed of the West's need for raw materials at nonsensical prices?

I believe education is supposed to serve the advancement of a people. But in the case of the continent, education is neither from within our environment nor serves as mechanism to develop our capacities for advancement. Instead, it is but a package contained in the blueprint of strategies that we need to adopt to be more Western- not poor. It exists outside of our context and it is no wonder that some people with PHDs cannot come up with original ideas of turning around their local conditions because they are basically learning to emulate the West in all of their education. And those of us who come to the West and return home sometimes refuse to see things from our people so that we come with suitcases of ideas suited for the West. We cannot answer the basic questions asked by our people. And most of the materials in African schools are developed by foreign universities such as the University of Cambridge, Oxford, and other former colonial institutions. In most cases, there is nothing African about African education. And it is no wonder that Africans know so much about their colonial masters than they do about their neighbors or their countries for that matter.

Interestingly, the article demonstrates the ethnocentrism that is so endemic in how Africa is viewed. The article talks about how things were better in the past, how " the University of Dakar, drew students from across francophone Africa and transformed them into doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were considered equal to those of their French counterparts." It talks about how Makerere University in Uganda was considered the Harvard of Africa.Can't Makerere just be Makerere?

The assertion that things were better in the 60s,70s, and 80s when most African countries were still under the yoke of colonialism is sad. But I do understand the omission that these were better because Africans were not running these institutions to the ground then. First of all these institutions had been segregated and blacks were kept outside. The few people who ended up to university were mostly those that the colonial institutions looked to use for its purposes either as a statistic or as a means to their ends. Soon after independence many countries inherited these institutions without the resources that they needed to run them. They inherited universities and World bank policies and conditions that were anti-education, anti-health care, anti-security, anti-development, in fact anti-African.

The whole equality of qualifications is even more interesting. It exists within a paradigm in which the African is deemed as inferior as well as whatever we produce, even academic credentials. During the times in which only a few Africans could get an education and could therefore afford to have access to enjoy crumbs from the table of their colonial masters, their qualifications were seen to be equally potent. After majority rule and the consequent evacuation and flight of colonial masters in some of these areas, the situation changed. Today, the infusion of African knowledge and values in any systems is always considered to reduce the quality and potency of education on the continent. Essentially, your Cambridge certificate is better than your local certificate produced by local examiners without the input of the British or French! Why? Could it be the vast ideology of Western superiority over all things African that is even evident today in the class room, streets, and job markets.

If a student comes to the United States to study, they automatically raise their income potential in Africa. It is the norm rather than the anomaly that Western-educated Africans tend to make more money than their counterparts on the continent, even for fields that they are less qualified. I tend to think that Westerners place a high value on the acquisition of their culture and values more than academics. Coming to the West makes you civilized enough to make a better salary while your brothers and sisters on the continent still need some washing up to do. This even translates to academia. You will be hard pressed to find the majority of African professors with far more experience of their field and experiential knowledge of their subjects getting their work published in most of these so called African journals. Instead, a trip to Africa and may be a bunch of books that a Westerner reads makes them an African expert.

So, while I do acknowledge that African universities are collapsing, I think the reasons given are so elementary. The article does not ask questions. Why does the World Bank have to tell African governments what to do for their people? The article even sweetens the intervention of the World Bank by saying that the bail the governments out. Wow! I thought bailing a prisoner out means that they actually come out of the prison? Reality tells us that countries are worse off after World Bank intervention. In fact the whole idea of bailing Africa out is deep. Could it mean that they bail us out because we are not really free? And why do African professionals leave for the West? Is it that Western governments entice them with money taken from Africa through the back door and that the local economies designed to sustain the material needs of the West cannot meet the needs of Africans for whom they should help?

It is nonsensical to excuse the World Bank for erring for the past few decades when in fact they are really about maintaining the status quo-making Africa the motherland. We know that children always take, take, take, and take from their mothers and never return.

And I refuse to believe that Africa's finest universities are crumbling because of mismanagement, neglect and policies that favor basic education. For as long as the policies of neocolonial institutions are to give the African enough education to socialize them into servitude, the finest will always be crumbling. I refuse to believe that the Africans who come to West are always the best and brightest, for, what bright person would let their own home burn while basking in the temporary comfort of a neighbor's house. In fact, the real bright African students are the ones who still get succeed in the midst of all adversity. The few scholarships given to some top students do not necessarily make the people left behind not so bright!

And I am not saying the continent is blameless, but if the West keeps changing the rules of the game to suit their circumstances, should Africa be blamed for losing the game? But of course this is more than about who is to blame. All I am saying is that the facts presented leave a lot to be desired. The story does not ask the relevant questions. And when we begin to ask tough questions on the failure of the African States, it is when we shall begin to see that far from the assertion that the continent has largely failed because of its leaders, the truth is that our failure really stems from the injustices of the world systems that have relegated for us a place on the periphery of decision making and action about our own destiny.

If and when we ask, we will perhaps learn that Africa loses more money in trade than it gains in Aid, that the impact of the AIDS epidemic could be lessened if only the Western drug companies had the humanity to put people over profits. We would know that puddles of crocodile tears on Africa's failure are far short of the river of hope that can and needs to come from acknowledging the failure of the world economic and political systems that control and exploit Africa. It is then that we can talk about crumbling schools with an idea that somewhere lies a brick and mortar to build the future of the children of Africa. Amandla! Word!