Maravi

The crisis at UNZA

The crisis at UNZA
By Editor
Thursday March 27, 2008 [03:00]

It is not an exaggeration on the part of University of Zambia Lecturers and Researchers’ Union (UNZALARU) president Evans Lampi to say that the University of Zambia is in a complete crisis. Actually, UNZA has been in a crisis for a very long time. But it seems we waited until problems piled up and started to cause a lot of trouble before trying to solve them.

The political leadership of this country has not paid sufficient attention to the problems at UNZA. Every single year there has been industrial unrest, student protests, closures, exodus of staff, deepening financial crisis.

Truly, if UNZA was a company it would have been liquidated a long time ago because for a long time, it has not been able to meet its financial obligations as they fall due. UNZA, by itself, has no capacity right now to pay its debt to various suppliers. And as long as this situation pertains, UNZA will not be able to obtain credit from any supplier or moneylender.

For UNZA to see a reversal of fortunes, the government has to intervene and assume its debt, leaving its balance sheet clean of all liabilities.

UNZA needs a fresh or new start – free of debt. It needs a debt write-off in more or less the same way Zambia, as a country, got its debt relief. We say this because UNZA cannot continue to operate under these circumstances if we expect those who manage it to start tackling problems in a rational way and come up with viable initiatives.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that those who work for UNZA are suggesting a hiking of tuition fees – fees which they themselves never paid when they were students at this same institution.

This is what happens when people are desperate and want to see their institution move forward. They come up with initiatives that don’t make sense but appear to be intelligent. These are actually clever suggestions but they are not intelligent solutions to the problems UNZA faces today.

Thanks to our members of parliament in the Parliamentary Committee on Education, Science and Technology for being conscious and aware of the fact that free education at all levels is still very much needed in this country.

Yes, we have a lot of economic and financial problems today. But in times of difficulty like these, we must not lose sight of our achievements.

We must continue to see the bright future and must pluck up our courage to deal with our problems. Let us not forget that over 70 per cent of our people live in abject poverty, on less than one dollar per day.

But these poor people also need their sons and daughters to receive university education and it shouldn’t be denied them, especially in this country of ours that calls itself a Christian nation.

If we want to start treating education in this country as a simple commodity that can be sold and purchased by the highest bidder, instead of UNZA being in crisis, the whole nation will soon be in crisis.

A nation which values its future affords the highest priority to providing education for all its young people. Education is a right that must not be denied our young people simply because they cannot pay for it. If we do so, we will be throwing away their lives.
Already, too many of our young people in this country, especially sons and daughters of the poor, don’t have a chance for a good education and this is a great injustice.

Education of our young people is a critical challenge facing our nation today. And this challenge must be faced and addressed in a principled way. And it shouldn’t be divorced from our values as a nation. We know that some people say you can only provide free social services to the extent to which your government can afford it. Yes, this may be true.

We don’t have much resources as a country, we are a poor country. But this is not to say that we cannot rearrange our priorities and allocate more and more of our very limited resources to education.

There are Third World countries that have provided and have continued to provide very high quality free education at all levels – Cuba is an example that is acknowledged even by the United Nations.

It is said that our most important resource is our people, especially our young people. If this is truly so, why are we not investing more and more of our resources into this very important resource and develop it to the highest possible levels?

We must undertake the training of our young people from all social backgrounds if we are produce the kind of men and women so desperately needed in this century – men and women who can compete favourably in this highly globalised world.

And the government acts in the place of parents in the provision of education for our young people. This country is not ready and will never be ready for an educational system that totally privatises and personalises education.

There are still so many rich countries in the world that provide what one may call free university education. Scotland can be said to be providing free university education to all young Scottish people who need it.

We must realise that it is not a favour to any young person for the government to provide quality university education to them. More than anything else, the government needs highly educated citizens for its own operations and for the development of the nation at large.

And we shouldn’t be misled into believing that because there are so many university graduates on our streets without jobs then the country doesn’t need more educated people of a similar type.

What this may mean is that we are not developing in the right way as a country and because of this we are unable to utilise our highly educated labour.

We think our country should work so that our people are enriched culturally, intellectually and technically without restrictions on this process.

So that if everyone wants the honour – we mean the honour, because it would be impossible to consider it in any other way if this were the general rule – of having a university degree, then everyone should have a chance to get one; without, of course, this implying that if everyone has a university degree, then everyone is going to have a job that corresponds to that degree.

But this is a problem that has to be solved by creating facilities for study, and, of course, in the knowledge that having a degree will not automatically guarantee a job that corresponds to that degree.

We say this because it is important that we understand that while there was an enormous shortage of university graduates, every university graduate could with that degree immediately get the appropriate professional job.

But the day when our nation will have tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions with these degrees, then we won’t be able to consider university studies as a way to get a job or a professional position.

But we will find a solution to this contradiction. But we shouldn’t stop creating more and more places in our universities for our people, even at the risk of becoming a society of intellectuals.

A society that achieves adequate cultural and technical levels will reach a more complete and mature form of self-government than a society of illiterate or semi-illiterate people.

And in this spirit, we should tackle the problems of UNZA in a more serious way, in a more business-like manner but without turning it into a capitalist enterprise where profit is everything and the main purpose.

Let us realign our priorities and give to UNZA and other institutions of learning more and more resources.

Labels: UNZA

posted by MrK @ 4:49 PM