ZIMBABWE boasts the highest literacy rate in Africa at 92 percent.
Since independence in 1980, the Government has invested heavily in education, believing it to be the engine for socio-economic development.
Ultimately the educated are supposed to drive economic development.
Thirty-six years on, Zimbabwe should have evidence that its investment in education is paying off.
Zimbabweans are known to be achievers in most countries where they go to work.
It is said that the majority of blue chip companies in the sub-region are led by Zimbabweans.
And yet at home, Zimbabweans are struggling to make their economy tick.
It is all blamed on sanctions imposed by Britain and her white European kith and kin to punish black Zimbabweans for wresting their stolen ancestral lands through a protracted armed struggle.
The sanctions are real.
The only question that observers ask is whether Zimbabweans have surrendered in the fight to assert their economic independence and sovereignty?
The black government inherited an economic system developed and run by the white colonial regime.
All systems are Western or more specifically British.
The education system is geared to produce workers, technicians and other personnel to service the administrative and technical requirements of the private and public sectors.
The education system restricted the number of blacks who moved to higher education.
The requirement for passing English language at Ordinary Level clearly shows the British wanted the education system to generate workers who could communicate with the masters – workers who could read and write the language of the masters.
The Sciences were also not fully opened to blacks.
At independence, the black government did not change the system of education.
The education system still produced people who would look for employment; job seekers not entrepreneurs.
For the first 10 years of independence the Lancaster House independence Constitution required that the status quo be maintained: the white colonialists were to be left on the land with no disturbance.
They continued to run their factories although most of them left the public sector.
The school curriculum remained unchanged despite the Nziramasanga Commission calling for radical reforms to re-orient the education system to give it a pan-Africanist focus, to put the Africans in charge of their economic and social/religious agenda.
We see the efforts to divert the black government from acquiring land after 1990.
The Bretton-Woods institutions in the form of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund start to force the Zimbabwean Government into economic structural adjustment programmes meant to divert it from taking land from the colonisers.
We see the start of factory closures throwing thousands out of employment. Even then the schools and colleges continued to churn out job-seekers.
Factory owners were complaining frivolously that Government policies are bad for business.
In short we note that the job market has been shrinking since the 1990s.
Post-1990 Zimbabwe’s economy was already being sabotaged by the former colonisers.
The huge swing towards commercial subjects in the school system was motivated by a desire by blacks to get well-paying jobs in the private sector as accountants and economists.
That mad rush towards commercial subjects is a raging fire even in the universities today where whole new institutions and campuses have been opened to cater for the Zimbabwean appetite for education, especially commercial subjects.
Unfortunately the economy has not expanded at the same rate.
This shift to produce more job-seekers in the commercial sector has coincided with the withdrawal of investment and other economic support services by Western countries punishing Zimbabwe for reclaiming its land from former colonisers.
If one looks at it objectively, there was always a huge element of unsustainability in an education system expanding out of sync with the economy, an economy under the control of non-indigenous Zimbabweans.
Put bluntly, Africans have continued to acquire educational qualifications for a capitalist economy that has been rapidly starving from lack of capital.
Current attempts to resuscitate the economy are still premised on restoring what used to be: large factories owned by whites employing thousands of black youths with five ‘O’-Levels, including English. Foreign direct investment is about foreigners setting up hundreds of factories to absorb our ‘highly’ qualified labour force.
Are we still fighting to build a foreign-owned economy?
The question is: Have Zimbabweans not woken up to the need to rely on their own initiatives?
For how long can we argue that we do not need to re-invent the wheel? All wheels in Zimbabwe have been and are being invented outside by foreigners.
Where is ours?
Even as we open up for foreign investment, which all other countries do, do we not see the need to first and foremost rely on our own efforts. There is no national economy which is built by foreigners.
Foreign investors complement the efforts of locals who have a clear vision of where they are going.
Where are we going?
Do we have a shared vision of where Zimbabwe should be in 2030, 2050, 2063 and beyond?
What do Mbuya Nehanda, Sekuru Kaguvi, Chaminuka, Murenga and all our ancestors wish for us their progeny?
Is it to have five ‘O’-Levels including English?
Is it to have diplomas and degrees, MBAs, PhDs, Honorary degrees and awards? That is the question we must address?
Zimbabwe is dying from lack of production. There are so many educated people who produce no tangible goods and services.
We are seized with a mad rush to acquire academic qualifications that are not linked to production.
Universities and colleges are churning out highly qualified, but economically dysfunctional graduates seeking non-existent employment.
It is not the fault of the graduating students. Because all our educational institutions are producing job-seekers, the graduates end up in the Diaspora.
We can benefit from remittances sent home, but is that how Zimbabwe will sustain its economy?
We need think-tanks to use their brains, not their textbooks, to engineer new solutions to our economic challenges.
Since the nation’s best brains are concentrated in the institutions of higher learning, then solutions to our challenges must come from these institutions. That is the rule the world over.
Government must capacitate the various academic experts in the universities and mobilise them according to their areas of expertise to address specific challenges and come up with marketable goods and services that Zimbabwe can export and bring in the much-needed foreign currency.
We should not tell the nation that there are no resources.
We must use our hands and feet.
No buses, walk to Murewa!
No plough, dig with your hands and plant a crop.
That is the bottom line principle for development.
Our comfort zone is fast shrinking. Tinkering with workshops and scientific conferences has brought us nowhere.
We must work.
We must seize our own development agenda and run with it.
That is what the Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Malaysians and other emerging economies have done. It requires courage on the part of our business and political leaders.
Come on Zimbabwe!
You walked, fought and defeated the coloniser despite his air-force and superior firepower.
What withholds you from flying high now?