Education no guarantee of success

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to equate diplomas with intelligence.

“Look at Jacob Zuma. The guy’s got four years of primary school and can’t even read numbers,” they’d say.

I saw things differently. “He went from cow herder to head of ANC counter intelligence,” I’d tell them.

“Now he’s president. True, Zuma isn’t well educated, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid, because stupid people do not get to where he is, so don’t underestimate him.”

If he had problems reading a seven-digit number, what does that say about our 400 or so members of parliament, some of whom are Harvardeducated, that from 2009 until 2018, none of them thought to question his fitness to sign the government’s budget every year because of his demonstrated inability to comprehend numbers or read better than a second grader?

I’ve met some highly educated people, of whom at least two had PhDs.

Many of them were smart and they taught me some things, but those “doctors” weren’t worth the parchment.

Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were even less educated than Zuma.

Still, they ran a country of 23 million people for 24 years.

Pablo Escobar didn’t have a university degree either, yet he was the richest and most powerful criminal in world history until the US and Colombian governments united to take him out after years of failed efforts by some of their best educated people.

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University and built a company which even now controls 90% of the world’s computers through its operating system.

I once met the owner of a financial services franchise.

In spite of only a grade 7 education, the man was so good at making money for other people that he became a multi-millionaire.

Then there are the “normal guys”, like a friend of mine who doesn’t have a university degree, but who bought out his employer’s firm.

He had a turnover of R400,000 a month for laying network cables and sorting out problems for some of the biggest companies in town.

Education guarantees neither survival nor prosperity upon its acquisition.

What matters most is how one uses the available knowledge and means to effect the most potent change.

I’m not downplaying the role of education or insulting educated people.

You can be the brightest nuclear physicist in the country, but if the government chooses to only use wind turbines and solar panels, you are out of luck and plumbers will earn more.

The ANC told the majority of our country for two decades that getting an education would lead to prosperity.

Now we have a lot of youngsters with BA, BCom or LlB after their names who can’t get work.

Isn’t it time we got our society and education system to understand that the world needs ditch diggers too? Mircea Negres

Port Elizabeth