The Sunday News
Over the past 37 years of independence, we have succeeded to churn out more educated people from our public and private institutions. At the World Economic Forum held in Durban, South Africa, a little less than a week ago, The President of the Republic of Zimbabwe reminded the world that Zimbabwe’s literacy rate soars above compared to not more than one country in Africa.
This status has always presented Zimbabweans as an educated people whose prowess is evidence of the threat they pose to other educated citizens to the extent that they unleash terror. Although it is not entirely true that Zimbabweans take other people’s jobs, the utterance is a reflection of consent that they are good enough to do the jobs.
Varying literacy percentages have been given between 88 and 92%, but the exactness is not the point. What matters is that a lot, majority, almost everyone in Zimbabwe can read and write, that’s what literacy is, right? This has been at the benevolence of a championing Government which unlike most Southern African Countries, prioritised the intellectual elevation of the black and colonially disenfranchised population. Professor Rungano Zvobgo wrote that within a space of five years, the number of secondary schools rocketed from 197 in 1980 to 1215 in 1985. He goes on to argue that the enrolment also escalated in relation to the increase in institutions of learning. Despite the challenges the Government faced of developing a socialist education system within a capitalist economy, education prioritisation and interest still grew. My point here is not to narrate the success in national pedagogy as promised by the socialists of those days, neither is it to brag that we are more educated than majority of Mzansi based on the empirical evidence of people leading the economy in South Africa and graduating top of their classes in our neighbour’s schools. My argument today is how education has been dislocated as a barometer of measuring intelligence and relegating those who are unfortunate as dunderheads, in the process robbing us of the much needed brains in leadership.
Let me say politics is better off without educated people; the world is much safer without information robots that are best at regurgitating what they have been taught and consumed from dead men and women’s journals. They brag about referencing what other people thought and invite the criminal Gramsci as an authority to deconstruct inferences that are thought to be hegemonic, forgetting that Gramsci himself, a criminal used hegemony to make them believe that he was oppressed and innocent and they should believe in his thoughts even if they should think that other ideas are dominantly imposed. It’s as if the existence of knowledge started and died with those academic ghosts. It’s funny how academics, as they choose to call themselves, have spasms of amnesia when it comes to analysing their “toolness” in the process not seeing that being educated has made them robots, with programmed thinking, best at examining and recommending what was created by another man.
Many systems the educated operate or research on, are products of intelligent men, not educated. Let me differentiate the two.
Educated or intelligent: Check yourself.
Education is a formal process of consuming another person’s ideas and helps them grow. It is a mind arresting process of conforming to dictated rules, designed behaviour patterns and constructed thinking processes carefully crafted by hegemonic systems such that one becomes a tool, or in nicer terms, an adherent of other people’s beliefs. On the contrary, intelligence is the ability to solve issues, construct discourses, influence behaviours; above all, it is a non-conforming repository of performance patterns which thrives on creating a legacy and supremacy. This is my own understanding of the two — you are free to disagree with me. At that point I remembered that my grandmother, my uncle, my friend’s grandfather and the san people who lived in this land before we desecrated it were very intelligent people, able to create a legacy, solve issues and create discourses yet they did not get a formal education, and that is what colonialism has attempted to steal from us.
I stress the point formal education because that is what the world today refers to as modus of ascertaining intelligence.
Seventeen years of pedagogic rehabilitation has been normalised by society as education. Today, man the thinker arrogates respect to he who has a prefixal reference of “Doctor Ncube, Professor Guvamatanga, Sensei Dhliwayo” and all fancy titles imposed on education by an oppressive yet intelligent culture.
One thing we have to take note of is that education is simply a positive externality, a benefit enjoyed by a third party as a result of an economic transaction. It simply benefits individuals by helping them get jobs and earn an income. Society forgets that being educated is simply a signal that you have acquired the skills to propel another man’s idea through employment in institutions that believe in that man’s idea. We learn to get employed and earn a high income so to reconcile with Karl Marx theory of labour — the more time you invest in a skill and production, the more rewards you should get. Successfully, we have produced a lot of those people, and successfully, they are the ones complaining that they are not employed, whereas effectively, they have given themselves names such as #Thisgown. It’s a pity that they are only educated and they do not see that their intelligent classmates whom they were educated with are making it big.
The bane of believing in educated politicians
Unlike corporate employment, politics used not to worry about signals of acquiring skills in a field. It had its own credentials, such as your liberation war status and role, your unquestionable loyalty to the Chimurenga, you religiosity to the Zimbabwean idea and your charisma. This worked well immediately after 1980 up to the period when everyone thought they are now educated enough to run a country — the results of ‘mari yekugona’. The skill, a few possessed after 1980 had become food for the masses and everyone thought they understood socialism better than those who taught them. Conflicting academic egos bore the blight of political science as a taught subject thus we saw the categorising of political behaviours to be called political theory, intelligent man’s executed ideas being called political philosophy and societal assessment renamed political culture and economy.
Entitlement encroached-lawyers felt entitled to run the country because they studied law which binds societal behaviours, economists thought they are more legitimate because capitalism controls this freaking world and they understand Adam Smith better, Political Scientists denounced everyone because they thought four years of studying dead people and their influences puts them at a better position of re-igniting those dead ideas or introduce those which have not been tried. All this has been at the behest of your academic qualifications instead of your independent individual thinking locus standi.
The more educated you are, the more preferred a panacea to our socio-political quagmire you are, so society thinks. We are thinking less that education does not matter on issues of governing people but intelligence does. Another disclaimer I want to put is, it is easy for an intelligent man to be educated but it is highly possible for an educated man to be intelligent- but we have always confused the two when we elect leaders. Case in point, many doctoral graduates we have since produced ever since education in Zimbabwe became very much affordable (to those with at least a modicum backgrounds ofcourse) are not as sharp as your grandfather who cannot remember his year of birth. Because education standards require you to write a thesis on a topic which was discovered by someone else and interrogate systems created by an intelligent person and offer recommendations, it’s very easy. Your job is to identify a failing system, find out what it initially was supposed to be, writing down what is missing which was originally suggested, then Voila! You are now a Doctor of Philosophy or even medicine. If you take a moment and look at your degree certificate, it’s a constant reminder that “You have been accepted into the Bachelor society of” whatever you have been learning. That inscription is a declaration that the accepting society has the founders who defined what you should know, or not.
Such people who parade their acceptance into these societies are the ones we are continuously entrusting our lives to. People who are taught on historical problems and how they can be solved should they re-incarnate today. People who have piled thoughts of other men in their schemata; surely that is folly if not a travesty. Let us think hard when we make our decisions in 2018. Does Zimbabwe need class-roomed politicians or we are desperately in need of the intelligent leaders? Let us leave the execution of the intelligentsia idea to the educated, who will be taught how to do it, anyway, he is good at following orders isn’t he? Should we make the error of voting educated men and women into office, we shall perennially be subjected to the same fate because they will spend their time making recommendations on systems designed by other people yet they understand less of it.
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