By James Tamba Lebbie
I have read several online articles on politics in Africa that have made claims that in many developing societies, especially Africa, politicians most often than not pay only lip service to their country’s education sector; hence the mass exodus of students to Europe and America to pursue graduate education. The theses in those articles are that those leaders would deliberately want to keep their people poor and uneducated so as to continue manipulating them for parochial partisan gains. Until now, while I have acknowledged that indeed, education in many developing societies, especially West Africa was lagging, I have made the argument that the causes are rooted in the poor economies of those countries, which even with the best of intensions are unable to boost our education sector because of the capital intensive nature of such investments.
Over the years however, I have shifted my argument. I have gradually come to the realization that indeed education generally doesn’t seem to rank very high on the agenda of our politicians; rather, their commitment to education would seem to be only at the level of rhetorics. And the reasons are not hard to find. Education is a long-term investment programme that requires many years to yield dividend for greater societal good and those politicians would no longer be around to point to those successes. In short, for governments in many developing societies, serious investment in education is not a guarantee strategy to win a second term not only because of the intangibility of such successes but also because of the difficulty to measure success in the short run. Therefore, politicians often resort to tangible and concrete projects that could be implemented within a short-term frame and which could serve as successful evidence of their stewardship in governance. They would use that to canvass votes in subsequent elections as proof of their commitment to developing the country. And because of their economies of scale, invariably, investment in education is therefore less likely to attract serious government attention. Another reason for government paying attention to infrastructural development could be the high level of corruption in that sector, which often comes in the form of kickbacks and bogus contracts, even though both sectors could be corruptly exploited for personal gains.
In Sierra Leone for example, in the past five years of President Koroma’s leadership education in my view has not been given the attention it deserves. For example, the quality of public examination results has dwindled considerably to the extent that a commission has to be established to find the root causes of such a downward trend. Further, academic calendars have been disrupted by frequent strike actions either by lecturers or by students for different reasons. For lecturers, their grievances have been mainly over conditions of service while for the students, the problem has been demand for quality service even if expressed in the most undisciplined manner. And to exacerbate the situation further, the president’s education minister (appointed most probably in good faith) turned out to be a disaster in the estimation of many concern people. The minister’s proclivity to see everything around him as either red or green and to treat his colleagues with an attitude they least deserve were among the many vices that shrouded his public performance for the past five years.
At this juncture, I will take a pause from retrospection and focus on the prospects of the specific issues related to education under the president’s “Agenda for Change” and which was captured in his address on the occasion of the state opening of the First Session of the Fourth Parliament of the Second Republic of Sierra Leone. As a brief preface, I’m inclined to be optimistic that the next five years could offer some ray of hope if rhetoric is anything to go by. This is because the president has indeed made some commitments to boosting education for young people. In specific terms, President Koroma made a commitment to “empower human capital with appropriate education to be part of programme implementation”. And to achieve that promise, he pledged “the resources of this country” to the education, acquisition of appropriate skills, and advancement of the youth.
And taking his commitment to education further, the president had the following to say in commenting on the specifics of his prosperity agenda: “We will act to ensure a wholesome transformation of the Education Sector; for without this transformation our people will benefit very little from the economic boom this country is witnessing. Our people need to be more entrepreneurial, more innovative, and with appropriate skills set to be integral players in the new economy”.
The president even went further to assert that the education policies of his government would be guided by a vision of “an appropriately educated, entrepreneurial and innovative citizenry, tolerant, productive and internationally competitive”, adding that he would “establish a Special Presidential Education Initiative for Entrepreneurship and Innovation” through which he would “personally leverage the wholesome transformation of the Education Sector”. The president challenged that “more than ever before, this is the time for rethinking the current system from pre-school through tertiary and taking the bold steps to refine it for more productive results”.
Fine words indeed but it will take more than rhetoric to achieve these lofty ambitions especially when those promises are judged against the backdrop of a president who is not only serving his last term but also who in his previous term of office had focused almost exclusively on “infrastructural development” probably for reasons outlined above. And while I will acknowledge that the country indeed needs some facelift in the areas of infrastructure because of its decaying road network, an almost exclusive focus on physical infrastructure at the expanse of social infrastructure won’t augur well for a country as deprived and backward as Sierra Leone. I believe the two should go hand in glove.
Meanwhile in my view, it does not take a rocket scientist to decipher the real causes for the decline of education across the board in the country. The government has to address in a comprehensive manner the thorny demands for improved conditions of service, which have been gravely misconstrued by some policy makers as just increment of salaries. And while attention has been paid over the years to increasing salaries for teachers and lecturers albeit in a cosmetic manner, very little effort (if any) has been made to providing the very basics in terms of a conducive learning environment with teaching and learning materials.
Clearly, evidences abound that the recommendations of the Gbamanja Commission of Inquiry cannot be implemented apparently because of the very reasons highlighted above. The yearly increase in the number of enrollment of pupils is inversely proportional to the available facilities in schools.
In my humble view, there is no need for the government to reinvent the wheel. All it has to do is to commit a substantial amount of resources to education and it should probably start by providing a political will to committing itself to the ECOWAS Protocol on Education and Training (with the Equivalence of Certificates as annex,) and the five priority programmes adopted in Dakar on 26 September, 2002, which laid a solid foundation for education in the sub-region.
The five priority areas are: distance education of teachers based on new technologies; support programme on HIV/AIDS preventive education; Support Programme on girls’ education; support programme for the teaching of science and technology; and technical vocational education and training.
