Sundaymail Editor
Elliot Ziwira – Extra Correspondent
CLEMENCE Machadu opened a Pandora’s Box in his recent article in The Sunday Mail titled “Why we should send our students abroad”, as he tried to justify the continued sending of Zimbabwean students to the Diaspora, firing a salvo at Zinasu for decrying the rationale of the programme.
The meticulous, lucid and coherent piece outlined the reasons why Government and the corporate world should put resources together and continue sending our students abroad, as this is envisaged to be effective in pulling our ailing economy out of the quagmire it is currently in.
The country is in desperate need of skilled personnel like surveyors, doctors, engineers and actuarial scientists, whose skills may be honed in other countries.
Machadu cited the example of China that has “400 000 students abroad”. It is not about having confidence in our local institutions,” he reasoned. Yes, gentle citizen; it is true; we are incapacitated to offer all the skills that our motherland desperately needs.
We live in a global village where cultural interaction should be the norm.
However, as true as all that may be and more, it is my humble opinion that the article failed to look closely at the events prevailing on the ground, which somehow vindicates the Zimbabwe National Students Union (Zinasu) which reasoned: “What is the scope of having scholarships for South African universities when we have universities here in Zimbabwe? It is high time the (Presidential) scholarship is used to support students in local universities … By so doing, the Government will show that it has confidence in its universities here in Zimbabwe.”
Although there is an element of myopia in the statement, there obtains a grain of truth in it, which should be closely explored.
The majority of our students go to South Africa where they are known to outshine the locals there, because of their industriousness and ingenuity, which ironically they do not learn there.
South African universities are well-equipped, that is a stubborn fact; but here lies the gist of the matter.
Why are our universities lagging behind?
Our flagship institution, the University of Zimbabwe, has been in existence since 1953, and still uses obsolete equipment in most of its key faculties like Medicine, Engineering and Surveying.
One wonders why the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Zimbabwe (ICAZ) partners with the University of South Africa in training its members, instead of engaging UZ or the National University of Science and Technology.
This takes us back to the question; do we really have confidence in our institutions? Unisa, unlike UZ or NUST, is a distance education institution offering a wide range of courses across the globe with well-established infrastructure that meets the prevailing trends in higher and tertiary education.
Where did we get it wrong?
Our universities need to be funded. Institutions like UZ should be able to take a leading role in self sustainability.
This writer does not really buy the idea of having many universities that only churn out half-baked graduates who cannot tell six from nine.
If the little resources available are directed towards key areas where skills are lacking, it will go a long way in mitigating our problems. We have to put our priorities right, and if the truth be told, even our politicians do not seem to have faith in our institutions as their children are conspicuous by their absence at them.
With 4 719 students graduating from the Midlands State University alone, 632 of them with Master’s degrees this year in an economy that has lost more than 4 000 companies to closures since 2011, it will be trite to assume that sending hordes of our students abroad would mitigate our situation.
Due to the high levels of unemployment, the bulk of the graduates from the country’s 14 universities will become redundant because after five years of seeking opportunities created by others and failing to get them, they would really have been reduced to high school graduates. They would really have to be “retested” as is the case with public transport drivers.
Yes, we have a critical shortage of surveyors which has put spanners in our land audit, as Government says, but if sending more than 4 000 of our own countrymen abroad was a panacea, why do we still have the same problem?
What happened to those that we have been sending there? It does not need a rocket scientist to find the answer; you cannot send a soldier to train with weapons that he will not use on the battlefield.
We send our students to study Medicine, Engineering, Actuarial Science and the like using advanced technology in the host countries and we expect them to come back and use obsolete equipment in our hospitals, telecommunications, manufacturing and construction industries.
In their frustration they leave the country enmasse to be of use in the countries that make them useful, or they simply decide to remain there after completing their programmes.
UZ has trained and continues to train world class doctors notwithstanding meagre resources.
We have to shift our mindsets.
A good friend whose name will not be divulged to protect his ego, rues the day he accepted a scholarship in Germany to pursue Chemistry studies. After obtaining his Masters, he undertook PhD studies, abandoned them after two years due to financial constrains, as his sponsors reneged on their promises; and decided to come back home.
Armed with such an arsenal, he thought he could make a good start for himself and his country, but his bubble burst when he realised that his advanced skills were useless with the equipment used in our institutions and manufacturing industry. Now he is teaching O-Level Mathematics and Science at a college in Harare.
It is my view that instead of sending students abroad, it is lecturers and professors who should be sent as they are the key components in the skills matrix.
Sending a single lecturer to an institution of repute will be equivalent to sending an entire faculty; and if his/her newly acquired skills are matched with modern equipment and infrastructure, then we will be closer to the Holy Grail.
It is acceptable that the corporate world be roped in as it stands to benefit more, but what they really need to do is to invest in infrastructure.
Online Reporter