WHAT HAPPENED TO AFRICAN CIVILISATION? - GULU UNIVERSITY

WHAT HAPPENED TO AFRICAN CIVILISATION?

GULU UNIVERSITY PUBLIC DIALOGUE

Sarah Bireete

23rd April 2012

While presenting a paper on the quality of Uganda's education system and the reasons for high levels of Unemployment, Ms Sarah Bireete, stated that there is an urgent need for an overhaul of our education system so that the system's products can have a direct link with what the employment market wants. The increasing unemployment rates in Uganda are not just a result of fewer jobs in the market, no, it has alot to do with the capacity of the graduates to meet the employment demands including creativity and the capacity to create jobs.

In her view, the education system should be tailoured to suit the employment demands/ to solve the challenges of the day. For example, currently, for every 10 graduates, only one graduate can get a job and the question that arises here is "where do the nine graduates go?", what happens to them, their families?

"The challenge, therefore, that I would like to pause to the youths- as the generation leaders - mind you, I will not pause this challenge to government because I know they do not have the capacity to provide a solution- the young people should study the development scenarios in Uganda, in East Africa, Africa and the World and systematically analyse the job demands and then design a programme/strategy of satifying the available employment demands." This, in my view, is the only solution to the existing unemployment in the country.

Also based on this study, Universities should be able to design course units that will promote creative thinking, that will promote enterprenuership, etc and in the end provide a lasting solution to unemployment crisis.

There is also urgent need for the mind shift by the youth/students themselves. Most students envisage employment only in terms of government jobs, public service jobs, big parastatals, etc. This needs to change if you are going to be part of the solution to the unmeployment puzzle in Uganda; if you are going to be positive agents of socio-economic change in this country.

For example, before the colonial era, Africans used to farm their gardens using locally made hoes by the blacksmiths. When the colonialists came, everything African, everything locally made, all our civilisation was declared backward! And we gladly clapped and threw our creativity, our enterprenual skills, our development out of the window. And now we are completely stuck with 80% of our population as peasants- walking bare footed, tilling the land with imported hoes from China, and with no market for their products!  A big chuck of our population is stuck in poverty, malnutrition, disease, hunger and we are all watching helpelessly!

We tend to be comfortable with announcements about how our GDP has increased, about how our economy can grow every year, but the question that the youths should be asking is WHOSE ECONOMY IS GROWING? IS THIS THE ECONOMY OF THE PEASANTS - THE 80% OR OF ABOUT 4 % OF UGANDANS?

The youth must interrogate these statistics, they must demand for details. Because, and this is very serious, after these announcements, year after year, the real Ugandans, rural or urban, are becoming poorer and poorer.

The youths/students must rise up and devise ways of changing the status quo because the status quo does not favour them. "The planners of the country are not bothered about your lives, your future, YOU MUST PLAN FOR YOUR SELVES".

FOR GOD AND MY COUNTRY.