June 4, 2013
My continent, my motherland and it can’t stop giving me headache, stress, frustration and disappointment even at the time when we are told by the optimists of this world that this is time for Africa.
The countries in Africa are still doing poorly in whatever global ranking you have ever heard of from human development reports, corruption indices, World Bank reports (like ease of doing business reports) and other global reports measuring child and maternal mortality rates. If you are looking for an African country in these types of global rankings you better start from the bottom of the tables going upward!
I am yet to find something we as Africans can be proud of!
Our economies in shambles I quiet don’t understand what they call the Africa’s GDP growth and other blah blah what I see is the people in this continent languishing in abject poverty and in despair and the African leaders like nobody’s business continue to rub shoulders in western airports to pay pilgrimage to Washington, Paris, London, Brussels and etc to seek aid, grants, loans, and investors to come to continent’s rescue. Whilst they know the continent lose much in the extractive industries and other industries like telecommunication very much due to poor contracts, tax avoidance capital flight and lack of transparency in oil, gas and mining industries.
After 50 years of independence they still think the solutions of Africa problems can be found in western. Now they have added China in the list.
Our education systems are failing us a great deal and I have never seen a ‘‘wonderful drama’’ in the sector than what happens in Tanzania.
What I would advise people, civil society organizations work in promoting better education for the children of this country and educationists is to stop shouting about anything which has to do with our poor education because what I have learnt is that the more the ‘‘shout’’ to fix things in the sector getting louder the more the government response becomes sillier!
The latest example is the decision to nullify the 2012 form four examinations adopted by our ‘‘leaders’’ after the massive failures followed by the public cry to change the trend. The reason for that decision we are told is that the grading system which was used by the examination body was not ‘‘appropriate’’ and the grading system to make those who failed pass will be in place! What a plug-and-play
In our universities people rush for degree certifications not for the content in terms of skills and knowledge and interestingly those who look for the content will end up have their heads crammed with the realities of other worlds like Europe’s enlightenment and renaissance at the expenses of Pan Africanism and black consciousness movements. At the end our graduates are a ‘‘mysterious mixture’’ they learn realities of the other world in African environment.
Surprisingly people outside Africa who wish to learn about Africa prefer to do that in departments and schools of African studies in America and Europe than in African Universities. In fact Africa is studied much outside it than within it!
Our politics has continued to be dormant still they can’t address issues like citizenship and identity in many places still people pay allegiance much to their tribes, sect or religion than their states. It seems those divisions (religions, tribes, regional) cannot free us anytime soon.
In Tanzania with our early efforts after independence to bury the vices at some point it looked like we succeeded in creating a nation but that is not the case the religious diatribes we are now witnessing reminding us we still have deadly threat to deal with. That is the same in other countries like Kenya, Mali, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and you can go on and on!
Much of the problems are not without Africans but within Africans we cannot change what happens to us but rather what happens in us should be in our control. Before learning anything we should learn ourselves and our environment I wish the juicy slogan like ‘‘African solutions for African problems’’ would be practically put into use. We still have a long way to go (if at all we have found the way) but until we engage in soul searching adventure to rediscover ourselves we won’t get even into that way!
By Ramadhani Msoma
Ramadhani is a political analyst based in Dar es Salaam
Source: http://wewrite.or.tz
