‘Financially transmitted degrees’ are a menace!
African teams in the World Cup have not been performing too badly but their valiant efforts are not reflected on the scoreboards of the various groups so<br>far.
African teams in the World Cup have not been performing too badly but their valiant efforts are not reflected on the scoreboards of the various groups so far. But we take comfort in the universal fact that ‘the boys are playing well’ though we are not quite resigned to the English consolation psychology of its not the winning that counts but participating which makes them turn ‘glorious losers’ into celebrities. Like other peoples across the world for the next one month, work can only be partial unless you are in a football-related industry. FIFA is our employer for now! Hence it was with a great sense of sacrifice, personal and political loyalty that I found myself abandoning Togo’s match against South Korea on Tuesday evening to go and listen to Professor Okello Oculi, speak at the Unfungomano Hall at Nairobi University. It was part of the Public Debate Series of the African Research and Resource Forum (ARRF) for 2006. Two reasons forced my hands. One, Okello was one of the radical Pan- Africanist scholars who had influenced my intellectual and political outlook as an undergraduate student. He was one of those refugee scholars from Idi Amin’s Uganda lost to Uganda but gains to many generations of African students in other countries. many of the Ugandans of that era headed for other African countries and rebuilt their lives, some of them becoming adopted citizens of those countries. Two other Ugandans had direct impact on me, Prof. Yolamu Barongo who was both a mentor and intellectual father to me. Another one was the literary icon, Okot p’ Bitek who did not teach me directly but was an intellectual and political influence through writings and electrifying presence at seminars, workshops and conference across Nigeria. Okello never returned to Uganda and is more Nigerian than many of us whose only claim is that we were born there. Our lives later became interchanged when I became permanently resident in Uganda as General-Secretary of the Pan- African Movement. So whenever we meet we have to talk shop with him sharing with me what is going on in the rough and tumble of Nigerian politics and I feeding him on my takes on the up and downs, the zigzags and sometimes motions without movement in Uganda’s politics! So I could not refuse to go and listen to Okello. The other reason was the topic of discussion: Interrogating the Conditions of The African Universities. It is a topic that should interest anyone concerned about not just the survival of Africa and Africans but in us controlling our destiny. If we cannot own the thinking process of our society we cannot control or exercise autonomy over those societies. And our universities are very central to this. They are much neglected, abused, maligned and marginalised but we cannot use other people’s universities as the engine of our development. So many sins have been committed against our universities but they have also been perpetrating many sins against themselves. The mad rush for private universities mushrooming across the continent in the name of privatisation and liberalisation in education may produce more people with degrees but cannot produce many educated citizens. Even within the public sector universities a two-tier system is in place offering apartheid discrimination based on financial resources. Okello called this FTDs (Financially Transmitted Degrees). He also looked at some of the internal weaknesses in the university systems including the process of recruitment, philosophical values underpinning the establishment of the universities during colonial and post-colonial societies, the pressures of SAP, the ideological hegemony of elitism and reactionary values. He identified the central problems for our universities as basically ideological: what is the purpose of a university? He identified lack of creativity and creative thinking and creative interaction between our technicians of knowledge and the society. We study as if our societies do not exist and our societies and governments, businesses, make policies as if we do not have local thinkers and qualified professionals. In plain language our universities are not organically linked to our societies. There were oases of excellence in the past like Dar-es-Salaam, Ahmadu Bello university and even the conservative bent older universities like Makerere, Ibadan, Legon, used to be real centres of learning in their heyday. South African universities, especially the ones for Whites have always been more integrated into the power structure, thinking and shaping the future of their societies. The discussions, especially the robust interventions by the students (a modest turnout given that Togo was playing) were both nostalgic and sad for me. Inspiring because I felt that the tradition of debate is not dead though sadly not fashionable anymore as students are taught by rote method and give back to the lecturers the half-baked ideas copied from their commercialised handouts. I was also sad that though many of them are angry and believe they can and deserve better they are no longer reading or having access to books that could make them turn their anger into a positive force for creativity and social transformation. They also reveal a very crude way in which the university has become integrated into the vulgarity that is dominating our societies — corruption, STDs (not Sexually Transmitted Diseases but what Okello calls Sexually Transmitted Degrees), dictatorship by administrators, authoritarianism by lecturers and discouraging alternative thought. When universities merely reflect the vulgar side of society instead of providing original refection on the society, they cease to be a universe of ideas and are doomed to become irrelevant. Hence the current attitude in many countries if you say I am a graduate and people retort: “and so what?†Ends