The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
On Friday, President Mnangagwa continued his exchange with tertiary institutions with the broad interest in promoting university infrastructural development.
The conference held at the Harare International Conference Centre on Friday is expected to usher massive infrastructural policy framing for universities in the country.
This comes against a regional outcry for restructuring the university to have state-of-the-art learning and residential spaces.
This trajectory is key in reframing the role and significance of the university in promoting national development; at the same time confronting relevant issues of decolonising the politics of knowing. During the same forum, a clear pronouncement for a 40% fees slash for students on work-related learning was made.
This shows that the Government has taken a bold initiative to restructure the function of the university outside neo-liberal market-related terms.
All development emanates from knowledge dedicated to ameliorating political burdens, as well as eradicating socio-economic problems.
Therefore, as Zimbabwe finds its new path to asserting its sovereign interests there is need for defined intellectual transformation which can compliment the current public governance structures.
As such, President Mnangagwa’s exchange with captains of tertiary knowledge production demonstrated the continued need for synergies between the Government and the academia; as well as industry and commerce.
It is even far-appealing to witness the inclusion of the academia in the legacy restoration process continued by the Mnangagwa administration after the historic November national reformation. That state-academia interface indicated the urgency of the two parties’ need to be engaged in exchange so as to bridge the knowledge sharing gap between the education sector and industry.
This follows the country’s dire need for the centres of higher learning to be conduits of development oriented learning — one which is responsive to Zimbabwe’s socio-economic transformation needs. This is against a background of the role of the university as an epistemic nucleus for our country’s much anticipated development since independence.
Success in this direction is dependent in recasting and reframing the mandate of our universities in serving national interests. The success of the new establishment depends on the mutual integration of the skills production sector and industry.
The optimism and euphoria surrounding the country’s current transition is strongly dependent on new ways of thinking and the university forms the pivot for that thought renewal towards the strategic efforts aimed at national development.
The Government’s exchange with tertiary institutions must also serve as a defining moment for the university to withdraw its leanings to hangovers of colonial hegemony.
Through its institutional and intellectual architecture, the university in Africa was established to produce ideas aimed at sustaining the then immediate and long term colonial interests.
On an abstract note, the university institutionalised the Western extracts of power, being and knowledge which were to be used in systematically deconstructing the identity of the colonised.
The intellectual was to be a model of European man and his ideas were to be inspired by the West as a benchmark of civilisation. To this date, the conservative function of the university has been the West’s depository tutelage of its ideas to the continent. Less efforts have been made to empirically define that chasm of experiences and definitions of the ontological densities of the coloniser and the colony. The conflicting contrasts of these two- worlds apart has been immensely polarised by the smokescreen of Western supremacy in framing the study of politics, sociology, science and economics. This paradigm of epistemic contestation justifies the logic of Global-South social-science intellectuals’ perennial probe on the universality of knowledge.
On this account, the discourse of decolonising the university continues to gain traction. Consequently, Government’s lobby in this regard is crucial as it informs the need for the production of knowledge which is relevant in promoting the growth of key sectors of our country’s development. This proposition to liberate knowledge also resonates with the post-colonial trajectory to liberate the economy.
In the same manner, the proposition by Government should be extended to engaging the university in restructuring the teaching of human rights and democracy within the benchmarks of African experience instead of the Western terms of defining our politics. In the area of humanities, the teaching of essentialism must come to an end. We need knowledge which transcends the glorification of tribalism and retrogressive gender stigmas.
On the other hand, our political-economy and public policy discourse must go beyond the preservation of the colonial legacy, particularly the subtle exaltation of oligarchy capital structures.
Over the years it has become intellectually fashionable for academics to deconstruct the importance of the economic indigenisation. The knowledge generated on the land reform in the past decade has prominently misrepresented Zimbabwe’s fast track land reform experience as an odd aberration.
The popular submission by our academia is the superficial reality of agrarian reform as a lever for narrow political or electoral hegemonic interests of the ruling.
Through this perspective, this economic liberation exercise has been presented as an epitome of Zimbabwe’s inept capacity to consolidate principles of ‘good governance’.
This position has been sponsored by the global order infused in our concepts of understanding politics outside our indigenous experience and self-definition within the “world order”. The historical logic of the land reform is erased in such debates resulting in popularised condemnation of this process as an undermine to White landowners’ human rights.
The downright dismissal of economic liberation terms in post-independent Zimbabwe substantiates how the university has been producing vanguards of colonial capital other than decolonial technocrats and economists with the capacity to acclimating academic concepts to their immediate environment. It then boggles the mind why the academia has been broadly preoccupied in lobbying for colonial economic control at the expense of the majority’s vulnerability to poverty.
In the process, this substantiates the gap between the university and the rest of the country’s populace including the peasant agrarian and alluvial mining societies. The post-2000 academic, media and non-governmental organisation (NGO) reporting on Zimbabwe has alienated the experiences of these communities.
The benefit of such communities from the country’s economic empowerment programmes have been side-lined in mainstream policy debates anchored by the NGO and the university. This substantiates that the current state of knowledge production has been less centred on African terms in defining the Zimbabwean experience. Therefore, the university has the mandate to align its function to the call for the Government to be responsive to the direction of development which Zimbabwe needs.
The gap between the university and the informal economic communities has only led to the dismal failure in conceptualising the value of incomes which can be acquired from wider benefits which could be generated from smallholder access to land. Liberated and decolonial emphasis on economics must have profound focus how the post-colonial economic policies could be instrumental in poverty reduction. Bridging that gap through research would incentivise subsistence and commercial farming as well as giving scientific direction in Government’s review of the land tenure concerns.
The university must shift its focus from conservative terms of knowledge production towards pragmatic repositioning of productivity by generating knowledge which could help in harnessing sustainable food security models.
Factoring in the current state of our broad base dependency on the land, our academia must dedicate research innovation to environment conservation concerns at the same time, producing knowledge on gross land ownership beneficiation terms, such as access to water, mineral and wildlife resources.
It is in this context that one can safely argue that the university must serve as a nucleus for producing knowledge which is responsive to national interests.
However, the tragedy of our politics of knowing has been densely defined in terms sustaining the colonial benchmarks of knowledge making. Our post-independence dispensation has also produced variant contestations as to the direction that a university should take in defining the political-economy questions of the day.
Against this background, our universities will be inspired to transform the ecology of knowledge and curtail their neo-liberal conservatism in promoting an understanding of our development concerns. It is my hope that the Government will develop this culture of engagement so that all sectors assigned to national growth may diligently execute their tasks.
Iwe neni tinebasa
-Richard Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in architecture of governance in Africa and political theory.
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