Recipes for failure - Tertiary Education in Namibia

Recipes for failure - Tertiary Education in Namibia

Last week the executive director of the Ministry of Higher Education, Dr Alfred van Kent told a SADC meeting of ministers responsible for education, training ,science and technology in Windhoek that ‘we spend 20-25% of  our national budget in education but the quality of the outcomes of education systems remain a challenge’. By implication I and several thousand other people  teaching at UNAM, NUST and IUM are producing the very graduates that are of such questionable quality. By virtue of his position Dr van Kent has every right to point the finger at those who are paid to educate

There is however an ancient truism that when you point a finger at someone else there are invariably three fingers pointed back at you. So Dr van  Kent let us look at the first finger.  Imagine that you are running a business and you are asked to define whether you are a ‘success’. The normal response would be that your success would depend upon whether you are making a profit. Only if you are a bad businessperson  would you define success as the number of goods you made. Earlier this year Mr Schlettwein brought down his budget and one of the documents that was presented to the national Assembly was the ‘Government’s Accountability Report 2017/18 . In the report on page 179 the Ministry of Higher Education under the definition of ‘success’ said ‘the progression and repetition rates determine the internal efficiency of an education system. In 2017, 83.5% of the students were either in their first year or had progressed to the next level while 16.5% were repeating a year. So Dr van Kent if I passed all of students irrespective of whether they studied or not I would be defined as a very efficient teacher? Perhaps the very reason that you complained to the SADC ministers is because of the very criteria that your ministry sets for success. This criteria for what your department calls ‘success’ is not, in my opinion,  success by any reasonable measure but the standard which creates the very outcomes of which you complained.  

Staff at the nation’s universities know perfectly well that if they fail large numbers of students that are not up to standard or because they do not work then they will be the ones blamed and not the students. At UNAM I am forced to give up to four exams for each course in the event that a student fails – normal, supplementary, winter/summer term, and promotional exam. That is directly a result of your ministry’s definition of success. As long as the criteria for evaluating the nation’s universities and its academics is the pass rate and not academic excellence and students being employable both domestically and internationally,  then we are wasting the nation’s money and the students’ time.

But that is only one finger, Dr van Kent. The second finger which explains why we spend N$3 billion per year on tertiary education and get what you know are poor outcomes is that despite having a National Human Resources Plan (2010 – 2025) which tells us precisely what type of students we need and was prepared by the National Planning Commission we make no reference to it in our planning. Few education planners even know it exists and even in 2010 the plan stated that we do not need most of the university graduates we are producing. We now have nurses and doctors demonstrating because there are no jobs available. The reason is simple enough- bad planning or a complete absence of it. By 2015 Mr Schlettwein had told the nation that he no longer has the resources to keep hiring staff for the public service. So if we are looking for a year, then 2015 is the end of Namibia’s post-colonial era when everyone graduating from our universities went straight to government. But at the heart of the problem is that if we have a student who has the grades to enter accounting or economics, irrespective of market demand we will allow them in rather than basing admission on what Namibia needs as per the nation’s HR plan. This is the greatest weakness of out tertiary education system as we simply continue to bring in more students even though we know there are no jobs.

The third finger Dr van Kent is the NSFAF. Roughly half of the students that come to university in Namibia are subsidized by the state. A student coming to UNAM gets N$23,000 in living allowance for the year. This is not a great deal of money but a student will very quickly figure out that after finishing high school you are confronted with two choices. You can be unemployed now which is a certainty for a very large proportion of Namibia’s high school graduates or take an NSFAF ‘loan’ and go to university. That means, given the current labour market that you are likely, but perhaps less likely, to be unemployed in four years’ time. Given that this is a ‘loan’ that many do not pay back then the choice is pretty obvious. As a result, a significant number of the students are not motivated to do anything but just pass their exams for four years with a minimum of work so they can continue to get government allowances.

But Dr van Kent, the thumb points aggressively downwards when you point at us. We have fallen for the ideas sold to us by IMF and World Bank that we just need more and better education and all will be well. Transform our mineral capital into human capital and the economy will prosper. The ‘elephant in the room’ is the fact that the supply of students does not create its own demand. In even large Africa countries like Nigeria and South Africa there are massively high unemployment rates even amongst technically trained graduates. Why? Because of Africa’s place in the global production system- we make little more than holes in the ground to extract natural resources and this activity is on the edge of full automation. No amount of tweaking the tertiary education system will change the outcomes until African countries start producing products for the local and export market. Until we generate dynamic local economies where investment is welcome then no changes in the education system will give our youth better outcomes. Namibia’s children will remain unemployed, even the very bright ones.

These are the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of UNAM where he is employed.