Education Results: From Sick Bed to Death Bed

Thulaganyo Jankey | Tuesday January 31, 2023 06:00

Then it was moved from the general ward onto the death bed. It is then that the powers that ought to be waded in to fire the proverbial salvos to whoever doesn’t have their own salvos.

JC Results are out. Once more they continued the aggressive uglification of the national education landscape. It seems strangely that the system keeps churning out less-than-stellar students by the thousands.

Everyone knows that when exam results are out, it is a time of turmoil and great strife. There’s a constitutional response to examination results in our country. First it is the blame storming.

Everyone blames someone else except themselves. Teachers blame parents. Parents blame the ministry. The ministry blames unions. Unions blame the government for making teachers sleep in huts.

The standard is that the next guy gets blamed for poor results. People here clearly have never heard of owning up to one’s performance. It is just not in their vocabulary. We must, however, remember that ‘gremlins did it’ is not a valid explanation when things go south and in education things have gone deeper than south.

Accountability is so out of fashion that if you ask for a morsel of it from the powers that be they will blankly stare at you like you are something the cat dragged in. After the blame-storming, we then move to the talking stage. One of the best things we are blessed with as a nation is talking endlessly about stuff. I reckon if Russia declared war on Botswana and brought what is remaining of their artillery from the war with Ukraine and deployed them around our borders, we will ask them to talk about it.

I am saying this with a very serious face. Radio anchors will call the generals to come down to their studios and discuss why they want to invade our country. All radio stations, all 16 of them. So in the case of the poor results the radio stations, TV stations, newspapers and online publications will call officials from the Ministry of Education and all sorts of experts in education including pseudo-experts with very questionable expertise to come and dissect the issues around poor results.

Obviously the world-famous Mr K, who is the resident commentator in all local radio stations, will weigh in with his take on the poor results or talk about procuring tractors for farmers in the Kgalagadi District. No radio discussion in this country without Mr K’s comments and wisdom. Poor education results in Botswana receive the same type of treatment like economic diversification. We talk and talk and talk and talk about them until everyone is blue in the face without actually doing anything about it.

As a country we need to exorcise the ghost of talk and donothingism. I am thinking here of serious exorcists like the Eloyi church and ZCC. A huge national crusade should be organised in the various stadia and the powers that be should converge in these venues to exorcise them of the donothingism bones and molecules. We need not worry about the fact that our stadia have failed the AFCON tests because they are always passing the church tests i.e. crusades and crossovers.

The stadia are all church-compliant. You can be sure the ha-ha quotient of other countries will have amplified somewhat because seemingly we cannot deal with issues education. It looks like wisdom is chasing us but we have always been faster. It seems non-existent solutions and poor planning are not the province of only the uneducated. Next year the cycle is repeated. Alas! (For comments, feedback and insults email inkspills1969@gmail.com) Thulaganyo Jankey is a training consultant who runs his own training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses. His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses. Contact him on 74447920 or email ultimaxtraining@gmail.com.