The crisis of knowledge in Uganda, precious secrets Museveni is hoarding
I laughed until I keeled when I read last week that Uganda’s High Court had ordered the closure of all 63 Bridge International schools in Uganda because they “provided unsanitary learning conditions, used unqualified teachers and were not properly licensed”.
That describes easily 60 per cent of private and government schools in Uganda. This is a country where children still study under mango trees, with heroic teachers wearing trousers with their dusty knees peeping through. Yet, all those will continue.
Bridge International Academies has been having a hard time elsewhere in Africa, partly for good reasons – but the real, noble reason, is the fear of allowing foreign firms muscling into the education sector. That has created a related less noble problem—the fear of local investors in private education of being out-competed.
You mix the two, and you have a potent force.
Bridge International should be pushed to improve, sure, but it shouldn’t be singled out.
But even then, all that is a sideshow. The problem with our education is not the quality of teachers, hygiene, or classrooms. It is the big how and why of it.
A good friend, who shall remain unnamed, runs a ‘university’ without buildings. Basically the teachers and students spend all their time roaming the forests and bushes, and talking to people to communities to learn what they know and codify their findings.
As we have written in this column before, some call this “indigenous knowledge systems”. I read recently that the South African government spends millions on dollars funding this kind of research.
Before you snigger, remember Jill Farrant, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town? She made word headlines last year with her work on “resurrection plants”.
She is unlocking the genetic codes of drought-tolerant plants could help farmers toiling in increasingly hot and dry conditions, like those in Isingiro.
Resurrection plants can survive extreme water shortages for years.
During a drought, they act like a seed, becoming so dry it appears dead.
But when the skies finally open and the rain pours down, as one report noted, the shrivelled plant bursts “back to life”, turning green and robust in just a few hours.
This is important, because the UN estimates that climate change could reduce maize yields alone across parts of Africa by as much as 30 per cent by 2030.
To survive, we need systems that can recover from a drastic change in climate.
In our villages, there are many plants like that and the peasants know them. Nothing is more valuable than; first, getting to them and having them tell you.
Farrant, herself a farmer’s daughter, would tell you the only way to do that is walk the bushes and village paths, first. She said she stumbled upon a resurrection plant as a nine-year-old and was blown away by its seemingly ‘immortal’ properties.
Sometime back I spoke to someone who visited with President Museveni on one of his farms. We know Museveni the strongman President, and the cattle keeper.
This good man told me what surprised him was the President’s knowledge of the flora on his farm.
“He knows the names of every plant on the farm, and will tell you in detail all their properties and what they can be used for”, he told me.
In other words, while Museveni sees himself as Uganda’s saviour before he “can control the army” and so forth, the most important knowledge he has for the future of the country is locked away, unexploited.
The man could run seminars on his farm on the mystery of plants that can bring the country food security, and probably become a global hit, but he is prouder of something that doesn’t have equal potential – his long-horned cattle.
Yet, I understand, to make that shift is a Herculean task, and you don’t overturn 100 years of something easily. But related to that, now we are done with the why, is something that is simpler. The how. Again we go back to South Africa. It’s worth reading up on the Unizulu Science Centre.
Unizulu does two things; it works on making the teaching of science and other complex fun. Secondly, it battles with the problem of language – that bright lad in Kaberamaido, who has not mastered English (and perhaps never will) but can be taught how windmills work in Ateso. How do you do it?
The results they are getting are very exciting. The fixation with walls, or even our definition of who a teacher is needs to be updated.
These things will need opening up our education to people (Ugandans and non-Ugandans) who may not always see things in our old ways. But it’s important to fight the right battles, if we have to fight.
Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3
