Education sinking deeper into crisis

Dithapelo Keorapetse | Friday August 26, 2016 14:57

The Department of Tertiary Education Financing (DTEF) in the Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MOESD) features prominently in the local press and airwaves for all the wrong reasons. There isn’t much Parliament can do other than for MPs to ask questions and use the opportunity of the budget speech session, especially committee stages and the State of the National Address to voice out the people’s concerns.

The Minister of Education and her two assistants appear to be either not in charge or have a little or no clue about what is going on in the ministry.

At the start of academic years and semesters of local tertiary institutions, admitted learners are faced with numerous challenges. It is usually unclear who will get sponsored by the government and why. Programmes and the number of students per programmes are cut down in a manner that presupposes unpreparedness or deficiencies in planning. Certificate and diploma programmes in some if not all private institutions will not be sponsored by the government this year and afterwards.

Retakes, repeats, supplementary exams and extensions are almost impossible to be sponsored as there are no clear guidelines followed especially at the level of implementation. Thousands of students admitted at institutions will not be sponsored this year and beyond. Some of these schools will, as a result, close shop.

Tertiary institutions are seldom informed well on time of the decisions to cut programmes or the number of students sponsored by the DTEF. The sector has been privatised and highly commercialised in a clandestine way akin to state capture.

The plan of some unscrupulous and corrupt political, business and bureaucratic elites is to close down most public tertiary institutions like Institutes of Health Sciences, Teaching Colleges, brigades, technical colleges and some faculties and departments of the University of Botswana (UB), Botswana Accountancy College (BAC) and Botswana University of Science and Natural Resources (BUAN). The idea is to take students away from these institutions and in a way force them to go to private institutions where there are illicit incentives for the political, business and bureaucratic elites.

Members of Parliament are often required to intervene on behalf of their constituents to seek direct answers from DTEF officials.

From the few questions answered in Parliament, interactions with officials and students as well as public statements made by ministers and government officials, one thing is clear; education system in this country is in a state of crisis. Currently there is no money to pay for students at tertiary institutions, whether private or public.

The Vice President hinted this at a kgotla meeting recently. It is unclear where the money has gone or whether this particular sector was not properly budgeted for. Institutions were informed very late of the decision to stop paying for certain programmes and numbers of students. UB students rioted before they could be paid their allowances. Some ministers have been subtly calling for the abolishment of students’ allowances and cost-sharing in tertiary education.

These calls are now becoming more open and frequent presupposing that it is the posture of government; to cut public service expenditure low by reducing spending on education.

The problem, it would seem, is bigger than the lack of money or the need for parents to share costs with the government. The problem is political corruption in the form of state capture.

There are many fake tertiary institutions making millions through dispensing fake qualifications. Some of these institutions are very new but are competing with IHS, BAC and UB on some highly technical fields like, ICT, engineering, health/medicine, finance and business. It took many years to develop these public institutions including the development of infrastructure, human capital and other requirements including international accreditations.

The manipulation of public policy, rules and regulations is deep. UB and other public institutions may have to retrench staff soon because they would be no students to teach.

The opening of Botswana University of Science and Technology (BIUST) hasn’t deterred the corrupt officials from shortcuts to riches through taking government sponsored students to sub-standard private intuitions for science and engineering programmes. Perpetrators of these crimes deserve a charge of high treason because they are sabotaging the country and its future, the young people.

The issue, like one professor stated, is the inability of the broader economy to create jobs and has nothing or very little to do with academic programmes offered by the institutions. Over the years, Botswana has dismally failed in its economic development trajectory to diversify its economy.

The blame cannot be that many people are being trained on irrelevant courses, no programme is irrelevant or unnecessary in a proper functioning economy.

Why, for instance, are we told that there are many teachers wandering the streets without jobs when the country has 45-50 instead of 20 or less students per class in primary and secondary schools? This shows that the country actually has a deficit of teachers in almost all disciplines.

The government will tell you that there is no money to create more positions in education for these teachers, but there is money to buy arms of war including supersonic jets, there is money for the unsustainable Ipelegeng, ‘poverty eradication’ programme, constituency tournaments and other untenable handouts.

Imprudent management of resources by the President and his government through misplaced priorities, wastage and corruption, not money shortage, is the fundamental problem in the political economy of this polity.