'African intellectuals suck up to governments'

Staff Writer | Tuesday September 28, 2010 00:00

The appeal was made at the beginning of a two-day seminar of the Trust-Africa Higher Education Project that offers a platform for the strengthening and transformation of higher education in Africa. It began at the University of Botswana (UB) in Gaborone yesterday.

Commenting in a discussion of a presentation titled Trends, Themes, Challenges and Opportunities for Higher Education Transformation in Africa in Gaborone yesterday, newspaper columnist and UB post-graduate student Keineetse Keineetse said he was concerned that most African universities are co-opted by governments.

'Is a university a place of knowledge or command, Keineetse queried. 'Almost all professors do research for governments. Are they committed to the governments or society?'

Professor Adam Habib from South Africa said it is important to contextualise the process of re-generating the African intellectual.

In South Africa, he said, it was realised that universities were not attracting a lot of students for post-graduate programmes because the majority of such people have families to support and are usually anxious to finish their studies so that they may join the market to earn a salary.

'We came up with a programme to sponsor students for post-graduate courses, with each student paid an allowance of R150,000 per year for three years with the promise of a job at the end of the programme,' he said.

Another participant, media activist Sello Motseta, said journalists in Botswana are under threat from the government which seeks to control the media by using draconian laws.

'The Media Practitioners Act of 2008 is draconian,' Motseta said. 'It concerns a lot of people, not just journalists but even you as you write journals. It says media practitioners should be licensed.

'They want to regulate us, but we already have a self-regulatory body in the Press Council. The new law also demands that journalists must have specific qualifications, but this is difficult because this profession is broad. 

'Some journalists come from an engineering background, others from economics and so on. Interestingly enough, anyone can become an MP. There are no specific qualifications, yet this is a powerful position where people make laws. Even thieves can become MPs.'