SCHOOL SEEKS TO REDEFINE VALUE OF AFRICAN EDUCATION
THE inauguration of Unisa’s Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, on September 22, reminds us that Africa could be suffering from a leadership deficit.
Unisa honours former president Thabo Mbeki with an institute that seeks to prepare Africans for leadership positions across the globe.
Concentrating on eight critical areas of teaching and research, the Thabo Mbeki ( TM) School of Public and International Affairs hopes to redefine the value of education in Africa, by Africanising knowledge production and dissemination.
Projections estimate Africa to be home to the world’s largest ( workforce) population from the next decade. Yet, the states’ economies have failed to equal the population boom or annex the potential therein.
The TM School came about amid the realisation that in as much as this form of projection sounds good for Africans whose workforce population was depleted by centuries of the slave trade, it could also spell doom for its teeming population and the survival of African states in the future of the comity of nations.
The goals are impressive: building future Africans who can act as a bridge between the government/ public sector ( policy) and the society/ private sector ( impact).
The TM School wants to see how it can adjust extant colonial and neo- colonial curriculum design regurgitated by several African institutions. The social re- engineering needed to balance the social relations among production forces in a state lies in the education system. We have a great vision in place.
By imparting the right education appropriately, a generation can be built differently from others.
Considering that ideology and consciousness constitute the most potent weapon for the reinvention of society, educating the emerging outstanding African population in eight areas is designed by the school to ensure that energies are pulled together towards the greater good of the region: citizenship and development; leadership studies; peace and development studies; the study of government affairs; urban and regional affairs; simulations and futuristic studies; security and intelligence studies; and sustainable livelihood and resources management.
The TM School and its methodological inclination, which includes a transdisciplinary approach to Africanising knowledge, has the capacity to fit into the AU’S “African solution to African problems” initiative.
The school prepares African intellectuals and leaders, those who could captain the drifting ship of modern African states.
Mbeki played a significant role in the making of the post- cold war in Africa and post- apartheid in South Africa. He is a leader committed to education. He fears the African education system and what we call the gap between the town and the gown, which were palpable in his speech on September 22, so much so that his only succour was in the Tanzanian scholarship.
His thesis: if Tanzanian scholars can distinguish themselves by producing Africanised knowledge and contributing meaningfully to the academic discourse of reinventing Africa, TM School should merge this with implementation mechanisms that the former lacks.
It is too early to measure the institute, but the quality it portends will surely give this a voice in the nearest future.