Give them tools to move mountains

Stephen Mpofu
Is it not a tragic irony that Zimbabwe touts itself, and is lauded by other countries, for being among the most educated nations on the African continent when in reality the country mass produces half-baked professionals whose contribution to national economic development leaves a lot to be desired?

This damning assessment by this pen of this country’s higher and tertiary education institutions is not a deliberate mischievous act to besmirch Zimbabwe’s high record of literacy, not just functional literacy, but literacy of a higher order.

It is the verdict of Professor Amon Murwira, Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development who said this week that the Ministry was abandoning the mass production of graduates and focusing on producing quality.

“What I can say is that we are abandoning the mass production way of doing things to focus on producing quality graduates,” the Professor said.

That universities and tertiary institutions, numerous as Zimbabweans know them to be, have been mass-producing misfits developmentally, as the Minister suggested, makes one wonder where the authorities were when all this was happening with huge sums of the taxpayers’ money being spent in the process?

But a thorough going exercise needs to be undertaken before the Government abandons the production of graduates ill-equipped to drive the economy.

First the authorities must discover whether faulty ovens have been responsible for producing half-baked cakes that are no good to anyone or it is the bakers or the instructors at the institutions that lack the wherewithal to produce the desired products that the nation needs to move forward economically and socially into a brave new world.

A haphazard, or change for change’s sake in the production of graduates at the institutions in point might worsen things and turn the country into a laughing stock globally instead.

According to Professor Murwira, the mass production of graduates has seen higher and tertiary institutions producing an average of 2 000 graduates per university each year.

In the urgent need for Zimbabwe’s economic and social development, it stands to reason that half-baked graduates from the country’s higher learning institutions are a tragic loss when they should instead be given the requisite skills to move mountains that stand as impediments to the country’s advancement.

It is in this regard that the Government’s move to end mass production of half-baked graduates from higher and tertiary institutions must be applauded and supported by all Zimbabweans with the goodwill to see the country move out from the strait jackets in order to achieve President Mnangagwa’s Vision 2030 under which the country should right now be poised to become an uppper middle income economy.

What this suggests is that now is the time for combative developmental, rather than disruptive, rhetorical politics that leaves things at stand still and causes neighbour to hate neighbour instead of people holding hands as they set out to pull down stumbling blocks hindering social and economic emancipation for them and their children and their children’s children.

It is indeed another tragic irony that people, or so-called leaders were not born when this country as former colonial Rhodesia was experiencing birth pangs and as such have no inkling of where Zimbabwe came from.

Had these people had knowledge of the suffering of blacks in the colonial era, they would now be working hard to advocate for the development of this country instead of holding meaningless demonstrations to try to show the world who these leaders are politically – another tragic irony.

Development is today’s politics around the globe; for anyone to claim to have won elections that even courts of law and international observers know to have gone the other way, is probably the worst political self de-campaigning exercise that anyone can embark on internationally — the worst act of imprudence.

In Zimbabwe’s case, outside countries, including our former colonial power, Britain, say they want to help us move the country forward developmentally but that political demonstration acts as a hindrance in that way.

Now it remains for the people of Zimbabwe to decide whether they and their children and children’s children will feed and survive on political demonstrations that are inconsequential to the country’s economic and social development, or whether they will put their shoulder to the wheel in support of developmental programmes that will raise the motherland to the level of other nations in the global village so that our people may walk with their heads thrust in the air while cracking ear-to-ear smiles at their achieved development.