Is this the Education our Continent’s Forefathers Dreamt of?

The last couple of months have been awash on the South African media with images of Section 27 representatives, the Department of Basic Education and other experts discussing how the South African education system has failed the child in Limpopo province.

It all started when Section 27 took the Basic Education Minister, Angie Motshekga to court to order her to ensure the department provided textbooks to schools in Limpopo. These learners have been without books and teachers without teaching materials since the beginning of the school year.

In Swaziland, a public sector strike for the last 5 weeks has meant that children have been without teachers and access to education for that long. It has meant that some teachers have been illegally fired for engaging in strike action, in effect removing access to those children affected by this.

In late 2009, Kenya was rocked by a major scandal (not the first in the education ministry) where Ksh3.2billion could not be accounted for. This money had been lent to Kenya by a number of donor countries including the UK to assist with the rolling out of the free primary school programme announced by President Mwai Kibaki in 2003.

And these are not isolated incidences in the continent. Media archives and current media coverage continues to bring to the fore great inefficiencies and maladministration regarding basic education for the African child.

And it is not just any African child that is affected by this. It is the poorest of the poor black African child who also has no other option to access education. Our black African led governments have continuously failed the black African child.

During and after the struggle for freedom in Africa, many of the continent's founding fathers including Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta and Robert Mugabe passionately preached and encouraged Africans to empower themselves by accessing the best education thatthey could. Our founding fathers entered into agreements with the West that ensured education programmes for the African child were rolled out. During the struggle, many Africans were in exile accessing the best education that would ensure an efficient transition into freedom, in terms of governance and administration of governments.

And for a while after the advent of freedom, many African education systems were overhauled to provide the best possible education to their citizenry.

In the late 20^th Century and current 21^st century, things have changed and our forefathers must be turning in their graves when they see the quality of education the black African child is accessing. It must be a real let down for them when they see how good education plans and policies often fail in the implementation phase.

It is the poorest of the poor black African child that has had to suffer from the corruption and maladministration that has crippled the African education system. It is the poorest black African child that has no access to a feeding programme when the money is siphoned by a bureaucrat.

It is the black African child that has to travel by foot kilometres and kilometres everyday to reach to school because funds to build a new school next to his/her home or provide transport have gone to build a politician’s million dollar mansion.

I am angry! I am angry because our politicians did not all start out wanting to siphon money from the public coffers. I am angry because they have turned to animals that continue to produce illiterate people from our schooling systems, who are unable/ struggle to compete on the world stage.

I am angry that the black African child whose parent is a politician continues to access the best private school education within and outside the continent, a private education that very few can afford.

I am angry because the emerging middle class in the continent are being forced to divert money that could otherwise have been used to building wealth for the continent for their loved ones can access the best quality private education.

I am angry that the King of Swaziland, just by a mere pronunciation that the public strike should end in Swaziland and without any further negotiations in sight, the unions order teachers to go back to class. To go back to class to teach when they are not satisfied with their conditions of services and their remuneration benefits. What kind of an education can we expect these teachers to provide to Swazi learners that have already missed 5 weeks of school?

We, the citizens of this continent, just like Section 27 and other civil society movements, must begin to hold our governments accountable.

We, the citizens of this continent, need to fight for the rights of the black African child to access the same education as anyone else.

Because if we do not stand up for these children, the future of this continent, they will continue to be failed, and the continent’s prospects will be curtailed significantly

Behind the Scenes of Conflict

‘I am always scared that the police will nab and take me back to my home country or a refugee camp because I don’t have any legal papers’

‘When I fled my home country, I had to walk many days without food or water to get to a place of safety’

‘They rape us and our girls and there is nothing I can do about it because we are at their mercy’

‘I don’t understand why foreigners have to be allowed in our country. They are now taking our jobs. Why can’t they just go back to where they came from?’

Somali Refugees
Image from: http://education-for-solidarity.blogspot.com

These are some of the sentiments that I have come across from a number of refugees, all affected in one way of the other by prolonged conflict either in Somalia or another Africa country. It is always easier to quantify and qualify some of the effects of war like instabilities, increased vulnerabilities by minority groups, and economic stagnation. But very often, effects that war has on the family unit, social interactions within communities, and integration of refugees or asylum seekers in their newly found and sometimes temporary homes are ignored.

I have never been a refugee. What I write here is solely based on my interactions with Somali refugees in various parts of the world, and my knowledge from what Kenya faces, with an ever increasing number of refugees in the country.

The refugee status in any country has its own limitations regarding how integrated one can be. For instance, it stipulates that one can only work (if allowed) for so many hours and often the wage is perhaps not good enough for one to be able to feed a family. I am aware that a lot of refugees prefer to run away from the refugee camps and take on jobs that may sometimes be very demeaning so that they can be able to take care of their own. And in doing these jobs, the refugees often do not have legitimate legal working papers, are abused by employers in the name conditions of employment, do not have the same rights of recourse like citizens when they are abused by employers, and often have to live with the fear of the police arresting them.

Many refugees today were once upon a time successful people in their countries of origin. I know of people that were teachers, lawyers, public servants, doctors, nurses, accountants, police or defence officers that have now taken up jobs as parking attendants, waitresses/ waitrons, domestic workers and other jobs that they would not have otherwise done if their countries were safe and peaceful (not to say that the jobs mentioned above are not important). A few weeks ago, I watched a programme where a man, originally from the DRC had been a parking attendant in South Africa despite being fully qualified as a Maths and Science teacher (and he was very passionate). He began offering after school tuition to learners on the parking lot where he worked and was eventually hired by a school in Johannesburg. Because refugees often do not have legal status in the adopted countries, have often run away from home without any proof of their qualifications, it becomes very difficult to secure jobs.

Then there are the constant nightmares that many refugees have to deal with at night as a result of their experiences during times of conflict. It is very easy to heal the physical, and even when one gets their life together in a foreign country, there will always be those ghosts that they have to confront. When one witnessed their entire family being killed, it is very hard to get over that trauma. When a woman has been raped multiple times or been kept as a sex slave for prolonged periods of time, something about their sense of humanness is lost, and it is hard for them to comprehend life. Refugee aid agencies do a lot of work, and are too inundated to offer the psychological support most refugees need, and therefore a proper healing process is never initiated.

Other silent consequences of war include xenophobia like we have witnessed in South Africa. A lot of Somalis continue to face this problem within the communities they live and this increases their vulnerabilities. I have heard of cases where a school would not allow children of a refugee to attend school because the school could not ascertain what grades the children were to be placed. Refugees also suffer from problems involving integrating themselves in the societies that adopt them, and often face social rejection. This problem partly explains why they will tend to associate with those that are like them rather than integrate.

Our societies are not properly informed of what the word, ‘refugee’ actually means.

Our societies do not understand the circumstances that force people into the life of being refugees.

Our societies do not understand that refugees, more than anything, need our love and understanding as they struggle to integrate in our societies.

Part of our responsibilities as humans, first and foremost, is to identify and care for those amongst us that a most vulnerable. This is a responsibility that goes beyond caring for only our own. It is a responsibility that should be extended to those amongst us that really need our friendships; those that have faced far much worse circumstances due to conflict and war.

Next time you see a refugee or a foreigner in your society, smile at and befriend them. Sometimes, that is all they need to keep going!

HIV Pandemic Blamed on 'Beautiful Women'

I could not help but wonder how someone in a position of power could even say something like this. 

The biggest problem we have in the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS is that most people do not understand the science of the virus. This is something that the South African Minister of Science and Technology, Mrs Naledi Pandor alluded to when she gave a keynote address at a meeting I attended last week.

This article proves her articulation

http://www.thehargreaves.net/2012/05/hiv-epidemic-blamed-on-beautiful-women/

20 years on in the Somalia Conflict

Women and Children most vulnerable in conflict
The World Concern Blog

War in any country brings with itself very ugly repercussions especially for the vulnerable groups in the society. Recent development in Syria continue to show us that there are human right violations, poverty levels are increasing, businesses collapsing, people are displaced, killings and torture of civilians are escalating, and that children are much more vulnerable and in some instances their rights have been severely affected. But if you think that the Syria conflict only started a year ago, and the effects are so dire then begin to dig deeper on what the effects might be in Somalia where 20 years on, the instabilities continue, then you realise that the time bomb has already exploded in Somalia.

So much has been written about the effects of the war in Somalia from different angles and I think one would be narrow minded if they pretended to provide a comprehensive list of the effects in Somalia that was not group based. Practically, every single aspect of life in Somalia has been affected by the conflict, every single sector, every single grouping of people and yet there is no telling when the conflict might end (well I suppose now that there are bounties being offered for people who find Al Shabaab militia in Mogadishu by its Mayor, some stability may resume there but what about the other regions?)

All one has to do is search for ‘Somalia’ on any search engine and the effects of the Somalia conflict on the health of its people become very evident. Many people were displaced from their homes and have had to flee areas within Somalia. I have watched endless news clippings of mothers talking about how they lost all their children while they were running from war and the militia due to dehydration, malnutrition and just tiredness. Not long ago, I watched a clip where a man was interviewed about this and where he took the camera crew through the trail of graves from his home where he had had to bury his entire family (children and his wife). And this does not even begin to explain the problems of waterborne diseases that Somali refugees often are plagued with in refugee camps. Every now and then, various organisations band together to provide health services to select groups of people, whether in refugee camps or villages but what happens during the rest of the time where they have no access to medical services, and what about the other populations that cannot be reached because of insecurity problems.

The effects of the conflict on children have been even worse since they are the most vulnerable in any society. Many children have been denied the right to access medical services, education, clean water and food, clean and stable environment where they can play, and the list is endless. But perhaps it is the fact that children are often forced to join the militia and eventually become child soldiers, the fact that the girl child’s survival in Somalia is as threatened as they are forced into early marriages, sex and domestic slavery that should be most appalling to the international community. In no other conflict has the girl child been so commodified as in the Somalia conflict. And this is even made worse by extremist laws often interpreted as Islam that are forced onto the girl child. And with no stable government, the rights of girls and women will remain on the back banner longer and with this the hopes and aspirations of a generation of girls and women.

Poverty and famine, a yearly occurrence in the Horn of Africa and especially in Somalia is also fuelled by the lack of proper planning and governance as a result of the war. Lack of investment on agricultural education, agricultural infrastructure, and insecurity have made Somalis mere recipients of food aid, a practice that is unsustainable and completely dependent on whether donor organisations are able to reach the populations or even have finances to provide aid. The global recession has not helped either as countries cut on aid spending leaving more people at risk of malnutrition and related diseases.

That there is no/ insignificant foreign direct investment into Somalia, small and medium business cannot thrive in the instability, major financial institutions have collapsed, corruption is endemic (even within a government that is only responsible for a very small part of Mogadishu only), lack of proper road and transport infrastructure, electricity and water infrastructure, a critical element in business operation are nonexistent, means that the Somalia economy has but collapsed and that the ‘government’ is completely reliant on donor funding to exist.

That primary, secondary and higher education institutions have collapsed in Somalia means that many Somalis (but only those that can afford this) are being educated outside the country, choosing not to return (and do we blame them) and thus contributing in the building of other economies whilst the one in Somalia is in a state of doom. This also means that many Somalis are less likely to afford schooling, and those in refugee camps are either illiterate or more likely receive mediocre education. An entire generation of people have been denied their right to acquire something that would encourage regional if not global competitiveness.

When one really delves into the effects of Somalia, one cannot help but be pessimistic about whether the people of Somalia will ever emerge victorious from this conflict. One cannot help but wonder whether there is any myriad of solutions that can begin to tackle the dire situation of Somalis (both within and outside Somalia’s borders).

But when one sees the UN cluster of organisations and other relief organisations, multiple conferences on Somalia being held, one realises that at least some of Somalia is not forgotten, and the story of this country (with enormous potential) still continues to be told.

And the question one begs is where the world goes next on Somalia, and whether is there any number of talk shops that will ever comprehensively come up with a concrete way forward that all groups in Somalia follow with to make their country better.

On that, we wait and see as we continue the rumble!

Further reading:

From playground to battleground: children on the frontline in Somalia 

Somalia: wars may end but their effects endure

UNICEF Representative in Somalia assesses impact of conflict on children and families