Africa’s dialogue on economies, education

ONLY strong African economies can help fund education on the continent but that is only possible through effective trade relations between different countries.

This was a common view expressed by former presidents of various African countries on the continent during the first Fundi Inaugural Education Forum in Melrose Arch in Joburg.

Former Tanzanian president Frederick Sumaye was part of a high-powered delegation which included Rupiah Banda of Zambia; Karl Offmann of Mauritius; Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria; John Mahama of Ghana and Armani Abeid Karume of Zanzibar.

The African Presidential Roundtable was sponsored by Fundi, SekelaXabiso and the Global Age Fund.

Charles Stith, former US Ambassador to Tanzania under President Bill Clinton, is the founder and non-executive chairman of the African Presidential Leadership Centre.

In his brief address, Stith told the audience that Africa needed all the “brainpower we can master” to solve the problems of education on the continent.

The former heads of states were in discussion around solutions for enabling Africa’s economic growth through education.

All the former heads of states gave glowing descriptions of their individual and country’s post-colonial efforts in educating their own citizens.

What was common among them was that colonial education was not aimed at improving the economic and educational life of the indigenous people.

Mahama of Ghana said colonial powers’ only interest was to produce “grammar school graduates” to help them run the country and to work as “translators” in the courts and other government departments.

In Nigeria, Jonathan said colonisers taught his people just to enable them “to read the Bible”.

But the former presidents managed to turn their gloomy past into post-colonial success stories.

In Zambia, Banda recounted how his country after independence in 1964 only had 109 people with a university degree out of a population of 4 million people “with myself among the embarrassingly small elite group”.

“The country had no university, people had to leave home to come to study here in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Europe and others went to the US.

“It is obvious given the situation I had just described, Zambia was in trouble,” Banda said.

He said due to their dire situation, the country undertook a massive construction of primary and secondary schools and a university.

Banda said such responsibility could not be handed over to a private individual but became the responsibility of the government.

He said it was for that rea- son that the first public university was built and opened in 1966 but the number of people wanting to enter tertiary education outstripped the number of places available at the university, prompting them to build more schools and universities.

“Now, Zambia has 15 million people. It means we’ve been working since 1964. At least 60% of the population is young, people under the age of 35,” Banda said.

Similar sentiments were expressed by other heads of states.

Jonathan told the audience his mission to introduce the Nigerian people to the technological discipline began while he was a governor of the state there.

Jonathan said they wanted to “revolutionise” their students and to prepare them to change the life of people in Africa.

Offmann of Mauritius revealed how he spurned the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after it tried to convince him to stop the provision of free education in his country. “I said no to them,” he said. Zanzibar only had a university of its own in 2002 and, after a few years, began a medical school with the help of Cuba.

“I wanted home-grown doctors,” Karume said.

The leaders, however, acknowledged that things are not plain sailing, pointing out that Africa needed to turn the corner “by trading among each other as African countries”.

“In order to be able to cater for the education of our people and to achieve that we must grow our economies faster,” Mahama said.

‘It is obvious given the situation I had just described’