OUR country is going through many social and economic challenges.
To overcome these challenges, Zimbabwe needs to mobilise its resources both human and material.
Zimbabwe has arguably one of the most educated populations on the continent. With the highest literacy rate approaching 92 percent, the educated should be having an impact on the country’s development processes. Unfortunately this is not the case in many situations.
The effort to improve the ease of doing business should encompass deliberate efforts to engage Zimbabwe’s intellectuals in finding solutions to the country’s problems.
Current efforts to ‘stemitise’ the education curriculum must be part of a holistic programme to engage Zimbabweans in the ‘science-led’ development of our own economy.
The appetite by Government for foreign consultants to solve anything technical, including even the production of tomatoes, needs to be significantly reduced. Reliance on foreign experts at the expense of experienced local technocrats is a ghost that must be immediately exorcised.
The story is told of a horticultural expert arriving from Europe and being taken to the fields. In the garden he saw these plants with ripening large reddish-pink fruit and asked for their name.
Tomatoes, the host replied, surprised that the expert did not know one of the important horticultural crops that he had come to be consulted on!
This story is real; it speaks to the wanton wastage of resources by hiring foreign experts who in fact come to learn from the locals.
Africa, Zimbabwe included, has spent millions educating its young people, even sending thousands of them to reputable overseas institutions to learn the best and latest sciences in various fields. Upon return these ‘educated’ Africans have been parked in academic and other research institutions.
Government and local industry have virtually forgotten about them as evidenced by continued recruitment of foreign experts to advise on the very same areas of expertise studied by the local academics.
Local politicians often argue that these local academics are reluctant or unwilling to assist Government in addressing the country’s economic challenges.
Ministers and other ministry officials will argue that academics are difficult to work with. Academics are even accused of belonging to opposition parties. While Prof Lovemore Madhuku and the late Dr John Makumbe were prominent opposition academics, how many intellectuals in Zimbabwe’s institutions would stand and endorse the views of those two?
The truth is that politicians and Government technocrats have side-lined academics for fear of being out-shined as it were. Many feel threatened by the intellectual prowess of the academics. The truth is that not all academics are looking for a job in Government; most are well-meaning citizens ready to make their contributions to the country’s development.
By failing to engage and put to work our large pool of intellectuals, Zimbabwe has lost out on the huge investments made by villagers selling peanuts to send their children to school!
We have lost out on the millions Government has invested through funding the education system and providing scholarship for thousands to attend local and foreign academic institutions.
The reluctance by Government politicians and other functionaries to engage and deploy its highly-educated members to solve local social and economic challenges has partly resulted in many bright young intellectuals migrating to seek employment abroad and opportunities to showcase their intellectual capabilities in the SADC region and the Anglophone world.
We will blame sanctions and a host of other impediments, all of which are real, but this writer has it on reliable personal record that many of our fellow Zimbabweans in higher offices shun academics out of jealousy, fear of losing their jobs to the intellectually sharper academics or downright bigotry, ‘tribalism’/regionalism or political affiliation.
While jealousy and all the other human failings are normal, we as a country and a Government of the people must see beyond these petty jealousies, be they within the academic communities or between politicians and academia.
Most academics are professionals who want to do the work that they were trained to do. They are not walking around seeking to take the politician’s job!
Government must go out and head-hunt its academic experts and engage them to solve specific problems. That is what all other developed countries do. They harness the brain power of their populations to develop their economies.
Government leaders must regularly ‘pick’ the brains of their intellectuals and use the best information available before calling in foreign, often inexperienced, consultants whose agenda is quite often bent on ensuring Africa’s under-development.
You can liken the proposed practice to a farmer who harvests from the crops that he planted, rarely going to the market unless the item is missing from his plot.
Leaders must identify competent academics and intellectuals and engage them on specific development programmes and technologies.
Today the Office of the President and Cabinet are seized with leading efforts to turn around the economy. They should deliberately head-hunt those academics in our 13 state universities and elsewhere who have specific expertise and engage them to find solutions to our many challenges. This should not be an optional exercise.
Government is already investing heavily in higher education. It is time the people of Zimbabwe harvest dividends from their investment in intellectual development.
Engineering faculties must be actively engaged to work on our roads, even as part of larger consortia.
The up-coming US$1 billion Beitbridge-Hare Road dualisation project is a good example where academics and their students in the appropriate road engineering fields should be integrated into the teams working on the project.
At the end of the three-year project, Zimbabwe will have academics and engineering graduates with real life experiences that will enable them to undertake or contribute to future road projects.
Faculties of Agriculture, Veterinary Sciences and Medicine must deliberately engage with relevant stakeholders in addressing the challenges pertaining to their areas of expertise. Many projects have been undertaken with donor funding. They have not been sustained beyond the short project life as donors tend to shift from one thing to another, never allowing working technologies to be integrated into mainstream economy so as to have long-term impact.
The University of Zimbabwe-led Soyabean Promotion Project, supported by Government through the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and undertaken in collaboration with AGRITEX, Department of Research and Specialist Services and private sector companies is an example of a successful project that was tried and tested with farmers in many areas of Zimbabwe. Its potential to create jobs and reduce oil and soya cake imports has not until recently, been appreciated.
Government’s prioritisation of the development of the soya value chain to stem the huge foreign currency outflows to import soya products should see the academic research and development done at UZ finally impacting positively on the economy.
That scenario should be repeated for many other sectors as academics and intellectuals in universities and colleges are challenged and capacitated to research and come up with solutions to our problems.
We must rely primarily on our own intellectual capacities. Let us put our academics and intellectuals to work. They represent the cutting edge of our collective national brain power.
Academic institutions must mobilise themselves to contribute to national development. UZ, and I believe many other universities, must put together concept notes on how we could input into Zim-ASSET. Not much has come of that effort but we should not give up.
University leaders must count the number of intellectual outputs as part of their performance profiles. Promotion criteria must incorporate the impact of the academic on social and economic development of the country as they do in China.
There is nothing academic about education! It is all practical skills, knowledge and ideas to improve our social and economic well-being. Those with brainpower, the intellectuals, must lead in finding solutions for life’s challenges!
Academics should approach Government and private sector companies with ideas. Our local industry has little culture or appetite to work with university researchers, a common practice in developed countries. So we must deliberately engage them. It takes two to tango!
A local Member of Parliament must encourage those of his constituents who have the capacity, to set up businesses, build infrastructure and create employment.
Often, however, some MPs will find ways to frustrate those citizens wanting to develop the area. In some cases a developer will be denied access because he hails from a different district. But this village mentality needs to be strongly challenged and dismantled if we are to develop Zimbabwe.
Surprisingly, some of our local leaders will be happy to accommodate foreigners at the expense of local developers. But we digress. Let us return to the issue of using our brain power (academics) to develop our country.
Education is supposed to prepare children for the future. The adults of today were the children of yesterday. What impact are they making in addressing our current challenges?