Many questions on my piece on the path for Africa’s development and industrialization. Please note that investing more money in universities is not the absolute solution for deepening youth digital competitiveness. Pardon me, and hold the verbal missiles; I am not saying that African governments should not invest in universities after I have attended one largely free in Africa. Here is my postulation:
China has 99% primary education enrollment with less than 10% university attainment. They put all the best money in basic education (primary and secondary school levels), making sure that it is really great. For the university, they don’t really care that much. They outcompeted the world when they unleashed highly prepared young people into manufacturing lines upon their admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In the United States, they do the same, making basic education free up to secondary school level. If you want to attend a university, pay for it or take a loan, in a situation you cannot get the limited available scholarships.
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In Africa, we flip that. While Nigerian university lecturers are on strike, asking for more money (they do deserve it), no one remembers the primary and secondary school teachers. If Nigeria pays a professor of music $1000* monthly, a mathematics may be earning $50 in a public primary school. As a result of the paltry salary, public basic education has struggled or collapsed as with the cases in Sokoto and Zamfara states where public students have not sat for WAEC for two years.
The poor public school quality has created a vicious circle where extremely unprepared kids are “graduated” and fed into the university system. In the last JAMB exam, the cut-off to enter universities was dropped to 140. The implication is that you need just a 35% score to enter the Nigerian university system. Does that make sense? Not really!
For the postulation I have put forward to work, Africa needs to invest in its primary and secondary education, not just the universities. That implies that we must revamp our curriculum and have more practical with the elevation of technical colleges where young people could be exposed to practical elements of learning.
Yes, we must not think just improving the universities without the understanding that great primary and secondary education remains the catalyst to deepen national competitiveness through talent. Indeed, to export digital skills to Europe and US, Africa must deepen basic education because that is the fundamental pipeline to acquire the critical knowledge to thrive in a modern world.
*that is close using the official rate
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This conversation will never make sense to most people, because a lot of things with regard to education has lost their glory. What we call universities here do the very things our basic schools do: admit kids and graduate them. But this is not what universities are there for, yet we keep misapplying resources, in the name of showing off that we also belong.
Universities are there to help solve big societal problems, it not to take in undergraduates and proclaim them graduates, only for the graduates to start blaming the system for lack of opportunities. It means that the people you expect to solve problems are also problems waiting to be solved, it does not make sense.
Majority of the jobs we give graduates today are jobs meant for secondary school leavers, but because we failed to train them well, we now shift the job to graduates, and then pay them like school leavers. So much mismatch in the system.
All the key skills you need to succeed as educated person are learned at basic education level: speaking, writing, reading, critical thinking, rhetoric, reasoning, and all the practical skills needed to get things done. Once you fail to learn them at that level, even with your university education, you continue to struggle.