We don’t want classroomed politicians

Dhliwayo” and all fancy titles imposed on education by an oppressive yet intelligent culture.

One thing we have to take note of is that education is simply a positive externality, a benefit enjoyed by a third party as a result of an economic transaction. It simply benefits individuals by helping them get jobs and earn an income. Society forgets that being educated is simply a signal that you have acquired the skills to propel another man’s idea through employment in institutions that believe in that man’s idea. We learn to get employed and earn a high income so to reconcile with Karl Marx theory of labour — the more time you invest in a skill and production, the more rewards you should get. Successfully, we have produced a lot of those people, and successfully, they are the ones complaining that they are not employed, whereas effectively, they have given themselves names such as #Thisgown. It’s a pity that they are only educated and they do not see that their intelligent classmates whom they were educated with are making it big. The bane of believing in educated

politicians Unlike corporate employment, politics used not to worry about signals of acquiring skills in a field. It had its own credentials, such as your liberation war status and role, your unquestionable loyalty to the Chimurenga, you religiosity to the Zimbabwean idea and your charisma. This worked well immediately after 1980 up to the period when everyone thought they are now educated enough to run a country — the results of ‘ mari yekugona’. The skill, a few possessed after 1980 had become food for the masses and everyone thought they understood socialism better than those who taught them. Conflicting academic egos bore the blight of political science as a taught subject thus we saw the categorising of political behaviours to be called political theory, intelligent man’s executed ideas being called political philosophy and societal assessment renamed political culture and economy.

Entitlement encroached-lawyers felt entitled to run the country because they studied law which binds societal behaviours, economists thought they are more legitimate because capitalism controls this freaking world and they understand Adam Smith better, Political Scientists denounced everyone because they thought four years of studying dead people and their influences puts them at a better position of re-igniting those dead ideas or introduce those which have not been tried. All this has been at the behest of your academic qualifications instead of your independent individual thinking locus standi.

The more educated you are, the more preferred a panacea to our socio-political quagmire you are, so society thinks. We are thinking less that education does not matter on issues of governing people but intelligence does. Another disclaimer I want to put is, it is easy for an intelligent man to be educated but it is highly possible for an educated man to be intelligent- but we have always confused the two when we elect leaders. Case in point, many doctoral graduates we have since produced ever since education in Zimbabwe became very much affordable (to those with at least a modicum backgrounds ofcourse) are not as sharp as your grandfather who cannot remember his year of birth. Because education standards require you to write a thesis on a topic which was discovered by someone else and interrogate systems created by an intelligent person and offer recommendations, it’s very easy. Your job is to identify a failing system, find out what it initially was supposed to be, writing down what is missing which was originally suggested, then Voila! You are now a Doctor of Philosophy or even medicine. If you take a moment and look at your degree certificate, it’s a constant reminder that “You have been accepted into the Bachelor society of” whatever you have been learning. That inscription is a declaration that the accepting society has the founders who defined what you should know, or not.

Such people who parade their acceptance into these societies are the ones we are continuously entrusting our lives to. People who are taught on historical problems and how they can be solved should they re-incarnate today. People who have piled thoughts of other men in their schemata; surely that is folly if not a travesty. Let us think hard when we make our decisions in 2018. Does Zimbabwe need class-roomed politicians or we are desperately in need of the intelligent leaders? Let us leave the execution of the intelligentsia idea to the educated, who will be taught how to do it, anyway, he is good at following orders isn’t he? Should we make the error of voting educated men and women into office, we shall perennially be subjected to the same fate because they will spend their time making recommendations on systems designed by other people yet they understand less of it.