Online Reporter
AFRICA has been excessively reliant on foreign technical expertise dating right back to the beginning of the colonial era, yet often solutions well-tuned for Europe, Asia and the Americas simply do not work here, or create additional problems that were unheard of before.
An additional problem of heavy reliance on outsiders is that the outsider does not know how a solution should fit into African societies, the outsider comes in and leaves before it becomes obvious that additional adaptation of the solution is needed, and important factors like maintenance and repair require even more external support.
So President Mnangagwa’s Africa Day call for the continent’s universities, research centres and innovators to develop homegrown solutions that respond to the challenges of Africa and even their own local communities is very relevant. It also ensures that the first-class research and application is focused on Africa, rather than the continent being a very definite also-ran for some foreign research team.
African countries, largely since independence, have been building up a network of universities and technical colleges, with most countries now having multiple universities, instead of just one or even sharing one, the common position even in the late colonial era. So a large pool of talent has been built up, although not always put to the best use.
President Mnangagwa was a driver in Zimbabwe of demanding that our own universities, research centres and technical colleges should be, in addition to teaching and research, working out practical and viable technical solutions for local needs. This has expanded to the Education 5.0, where practical applications are now demanded across all teaching in schools and tertiary institutions, as an addition rather than a replacement for the theoretical knowledge. Both theory and practice are needed.
Seeking African solutions does not mean cutting the continent off from the rest of the world. There is a huge pool of knowledge, analysis and synthesis that is the common heritage of all humans, and Africans can access that pool and should add to it.
The colonial hang-up that Africans should prefer solutions generated in the old metropolitan power as these were likely to be better is really very out of date and was not all that useful even two or three generations ago.
The major theme of this year’s Africa Day is water and sanitation, and here the unique circumstances of Africa — the geology and even the river systems — demand a lot more African solutions. This actually goes back thousands of years. While European farmers were mainly worried about how to drain land, African farmers were worried about how to irrigate land, the opposite problem. And incidentally, that is still the position today. Most Zimbabweans are amazed when reading British agricultural textbooks on just how much space is allocated to drainage, with almost nothing on irrigation.
Egypt became the first major African grain exporter, at one time feeding imperial Rome and other Italian cities, because Egyptians had worked out how to use the Nile to irrigate as much land as possible, land that would otherwise be desert.
Compared to other continents Africa is remarkably deficient in rivers. There are four giant river basins: the Niger, Nile, Congo and Zambezi. But the rest of the rivers are far more modest. Aquifers exist, but need some very careful management. What rain does fall in most of the continent is highly seasonal and concentrated into a few months of the year, something that many in other parts of the world find amazing since they start crying drought when it does not rain for eight weeks.
But only about 5 percent of Africa’s irrigation potential is used, and most African cities cry out for additional water. The industrialisation of the continent will use even more water. So many of the solutions will need to work out how water from the few months of rainfall can be stored, how aquifers can be recharged, how water can be used more carefully and precisely, as well as recycled, so the limited amounts will be enough.
That connects with sanitation. Simple rural sanitation does not work in big crowded cities, or even in smaller industrial centres. Yet the solutions that use vast quantities of water for hygiene and waste disposal are not really answering most African needs. The theory is well understood but the practical and engineering solutions require that those who live with the problems work out how to do so. That brings us back to African expertise.
We can see the effects of using second-rate solutions, often by looking out of our windows. Central Harare and the inner ring of suburbs, as they were developed, drew a lot of water from wells. Those wells, even when deepened to about the maximum depth possible, are now all dry, and boreholes dry up and need to be deepened, and sometimes that is not possible.
Yet we carelessly destroy the wetlands that used to feed the underlying aquifer, and let most of the rain run off our concrete and asphalt and flow towards the sea. A solution would need ways of enhancing remaining wetlands, so they trap more rather than less water, and allow a lot more to soak into the underlying soils.
There are many other examples, and we have, in Zimbabwe and other African countries, been making changes that do create longer-term solutions.
So we know what can work, and if we push in our best talent, we can continually find even better solutions, and solutions in areas where our present efforts are not really viable.
