IN this series on the layman’s view of the economy, I am exploring how we Zimbabweans can build our economy.
I said part of my understanding of the economy has to do with ‘how we live and earn our livelihoods’.
In the present phase of the discussions I am focussing on the human factor in economic development.
I have argued that our education system must produce patriotic graduates who are proud to be Africans and who are determined to make Zimbabwe a great country.
The key is the curriculum content (software) that we feed into the minds (hardware) of our children.
I want to argue here that the software that we ‘load’ into our children via the school curriculum needs to be thoroughly reviewed as it appears to be inadequate and inappropriate for building our economy.
Judging by the reluctance of most ‘educated’ Zimbabweans to ‘dirty’ their hands, one must be forgiven for thinking that we view education as means to free ourselves from the obligation to do physical work, itself an integral part of building the economy.
To many people agriculture seems to mean hard physical work which one should try to avoid by all means possible.
How?
By becoming educated.
Even the passion of some so-called ‘educated’ African parents for education is partly driven by a desire to ‘free’ their children from the possibility of becoming involved in agriculture.
The real story is told of a Zimbabwean mother who called up her son to find out what degree programme he had registered for at a local university.
When the son replied ‘B.Sc. Agriculture’, the mother could not hold back her disappointment. “Mwanangu chokwadi ungainda kuyunivhesiti kunoita chidhomeni?
“Kowakadini kunyoresa BA inoitwa navamwe!”
How could her son register to do ‘farming’ at the university instead of a BA degree that other students do?
This negative uninformed view of agriculture is endemic among most Zimbabwean citizens.
It is not clear if policymakers have a more positive view.
The negative view of agriculture presents the country with challenges in building the agricultural economy through educating the required manpower.
It is also a challenge for the educational authorities all the way from primary school to university.
Despite repeated pronouncements to the effect that agriculture is the backbone of Zimbabwe’s economy, the education system appears to be doing little to prepare young citizens to bolster agriculture.
As late as 2015, most universities in Zimbabwe still do not list Advanced level Agriculture as a requirement for undergraduate degree study.
At worst some institutions do not recognise the subject Agriculture at ‘A’ level.
There is virtually no coordination of the agriculture curriculum content between the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education and that of Higher and Tertiary Education.
The Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education (ZIMCHE) must be involved in providing policy guidance.
Where universities are buried in elitist colonial educational camouflage, ZIMCHE and higher authorities must crack the whip: educational institutions must contribute positively and practically to enhance agriculture’s role in building the economy.
Graduates must be moulded to develop the right positive attitudes.
Agriculture at university appears to be just another not so popular subject.
Despite its strategic importance, Agriculture remains poorly subsidised and funded both in terms of formal courses and research.
The content of practical sessions are often superficial with little emphasis on real-life production systems.
While funding is a challenge, still universities and colleges can do more to move away from dry academics to relevant applied aspects within Zimbabwe’s economic spectrum.
We shall discuss the aspect of research and its funding in a separate article to see whether Zimbabwe is putting its money where its mouth is.
Recent food shortages have prompted some educational institutions to engage in food crop production on their own fields.
Even when that happens there is little or no practical involvement of the students and their lecturers.
So you wonder at what point the would-be graduates come to grips with real agriculture.
Clearly agriculture in most Zimbabwean educational institutions is an academic subject.
Poorly managed agricultural projects at many schools and colleges point to the poor quality of agricultural training.
The students may do well in the theory papers but grasp little by way of practical skills.
What if any role would such graduates play in building Zimbabwe’s agricultural economy?
There seems to be more than just a policy lapse.
The authorities seem to be paying lip-service to boosting agricultural productivity.
Given that low industrial capacity utilisation is blamed on low agricultural productivity, one would expect policy-makers to put great emphasis on producing school and college graduates, the human capital, who can build the agricultural productivity of the country.
In short not enough is being done to build the human capital required for Zimbabwe to develop its otherwise excellent agricultural potential.
I will invite readers to provide their own examples but here I will draw on a few personal experiences that throw doubt on our commitment to make agriculture a cornerstone of Zimbabwe’s economy.
When I went to study for a postgraduate degree in America, within days of arrival, all four professors on my supervisory team, took turns to remind me that the particular university was a land-grant institution.
Their institution’s mission, they explained was to produce skilled high level manpower and to generate the requisite knowledge, skills and technologies to drive the local agriculture and engineering industries.
Soon after arrival, my professor took me out to conduct field trials on local farms.
We spent days out in the sweltering heat pegging out experimental plots and establishing trials to find out how different soyabean varieties performed when inoculated with different nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
I felt somewhat put off by all this field-based activity away from the air-conditioned laboratories that had captured my imagination on arrival in the USA.
Somehow all this fieldwork seemed unrelated to the academic degree programme that I expected to undertake.
My professor must have sensed my unease.
He took me aside and said, “Look the science we do back in the laboratory must work out here on the farm, otherwise all our efforts are worthless.”
He went on: “We can publish a lot of scholarly papers, but if they do not help to improve productivity and profitability of the farm enterprise, they are all useless science.”
This approach was radically different from that of my former academic world in Zimbabwe.
My real education was only starting.
In the next episode we shall continue to analyse the disconnection between academic education and practical real life learning.