By Shepherd Manhambara

PART Two focused on the paradox associated with the education sector in Zimbabwe today.
On one hand we are proud that the phenomenal investment in education has made our population the most literate on the African continent but on the other hand the success story itself has become a double- edged sword.
Our education system is producing a large number of individuals not only hostile to their African identity but also indifferent to all those struggles for emancipation which Africans have waged against 500 years of Western slavery and colonisation.
It is as if during our noble attempts to democratise the education sector soon after 1980 we either forgot to decolonise it or were reluctant to “de-Westernise” ourselves!
This is the critical missing link–and a strategic and costly one likely to haunt Zimbabwe for many years to come unless something is done soon.
But first a look at some key aspects of the Nziramasanga Report on Education (1999) which deserve our attention in light of what transpired during the last 15 years.
The report is clear that our current education system is largely premised on the assumption that the acquisition of formal academic qualifications is the only preferred route to success and that anything else is secondary. In practice it means that more than 70 percent of those who do not make it up to A-level and eventually university are considered failures in one form or other.
We cannot afford such levels of stigmatisation and wastage when the country is in dire need of people who can use their heads, hearts and hands, people with all sorts of qualifications and aptitudes to develop the country.
The Nziramasanga Report clearly outlines the various routes for student development encompassing the business/commercial, practical/vocational and technological as well as the academic, which can be followed as equally respected and encouraged ways to success right up to university level.
The idea is that those with talent and or aptitudes in specific areas are identified and encouraged to embark on specific routes, which suit their abilities and inclinations at an early stage.
If this approach had been adopted early in our education system a large number of our citizens, who had to go to South Africa in search of jobs during the last 15 years would have utilised their practical skills and found ways of surviving inside the country.
Second, while it is critical to have many universities as are required by our population it is now necessary to ask fundamental questions about how well or otherwise that sector of our education system is doing.
No one in his or her right mind will deny that the land reform programme is in fact one of the most groundbreaking revolutions in Africa which is empowering thousands of people in Zimbabwe on a daily basis.
Because the revolution imperilled Western economic interests Zimbabwe unwittingly invited a vicious blowback in the form of sanctions and non-stop demonisation, with its leadership pilloried from pillar to post by an incensed Anglo-Saxon West.
The revolution was projected by the so-called global media as doomed to fail and many Western NGOs were activated to spread the same message far and wide.
The painful but necessary question is: how many of our university scholars conducted serious and genuine research to find out the truth? Almost none when it mattered most to do so, at least for our own sake as the intended beneficiaries!
All of us had to wait for some professor by the name of Ian Scoones to write his book titled Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities before most of us could be reassured we were on the right fast track.
As if to underline the impotence of our own scholars another British author followed up with his book ‘Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land’. Again Joseph Hanlon confirmed the seminal significance of what Zimbabwe had done, much to the relief of most of us.
Is this not a sign that our institutions are being handheld as captives to neo-liberalism so much that they cannot even identify research priorities for the nation on their own for our own benefit?
Should our institutions of high learning always wait for the British and Americans to tell them what to do?
We cannot talk about indigenisation of the economy leaving education the way it is.
Intellectuals produced by our current education system have been more inclined to side with the agenda of our enemies against their own country as exemplified by those in the MDC.
What then should be done?
Below is an idea which seeks not asking to re-invent the wheel but to strengthen what is already there in our education system!
It is clear that the body of knowledge which our education system carries from pre-school to university does not include a crucial National Studies Course which anchors students in our history, culture and environment.
The national curriculum has to assist us in constructing our sense of identity and nationhood. So far we have left this to chance and to outsiders!
No wonder we garnered a bitter harvest during the last 15 years of which the MDC is just a symptom of what has gone wrong in our education system.
Recent pronouncements indicate that more emphasis will be on the study of mathematics, sciences and technology.
But the study of all these subjects has to be done in a specific African context and will be utilised in that same context which in this case should function as a framework.
A medical doctor, a mathematician and an ITC guru who are not culturally anchored and not professionally committed to their nations risk becoming ruthless and ambitious mercenaries loyal to mammon and no other.
This love for mammon is exceptionally dramatised by the way our own MDC intellectuals were prepared to assist Westerners in the crafting and imposition of economic sanctions against their own country in return for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver.
The closest that the Nziramasanga Report on Education came to defining some aspects of this pre-requisite in our education system is in the area of Unhu or Ubuntu but the report was not bold enough to indicate at the level of content how this UNHU would be constituted to become the core or spinal cord of the whole educational system, generating the kind of consciousness which automatically defines and locates the African on our continent and in a global context but from an African point of view.