By Hon Amanya Mushega
If you want education for development not just growth or impressive statistics, you need to critically look at all levels and types of education, primary, secondary, tertiary, vocational and especially the area of skills training and development.
Education or human resource development should be looked at as a minimum national programme. It is not a partisan issue. We must avoid politicising education or else we lose what is essential in transforming our society.
For those who are already highly educated and tell us that primary education is not important and our emphasis should start with university education, let us look at few things. To go to university in Uganda they insist on your A and O-Level results.
To go to secondary they want PLE results. In other words to go to university you must complete your lower education successfully. Some people argue that primary education is cheaper and not as essential. That UPE dropout rates are high and standards are poor.
Primary education should not be made terminal for the majority of entrants. Otherwise it will fail. People go to school essentially to go up the ladder. Why are dropout rates high? My view is that there are ghost pupils who cannot show up at exam time.
Secondly, there is corruption where resources critical for better standards are abused. Let’s look at good and relevant basic education. Educated people handle well issues of nutrition, hygiene, and good health.
They produce children they can manage, their productivity is high for they easily adjust to new production tools and methods. An educated and enlightened population is critical for building democracy and seeing through pseudo-democrats.
For those in politics, you cannot tick the ballot paper for them. They are not easy to deceive. It is dangerous to have a few highly educated people in a sea of illiterates and poor. In 1989, I was in Arua, one Brigadier Kiili came to me.
He told me that the system that was going on then, where a few got to school, “if it continues we shall get a revolution”. I have never forgotten his advice and warning. So we need to look at education holistically. Considering that we have resource constraints, how do we allocate them nationally (national budget) and how do we allocate them within the education budget?.
As a nation we need to look at the following issues: How do we widen the tax base within the other available areas that are currently not taxed? Whom and what should we tax- a person with a small shop while those with huge pieces of land used or idle or those with dormant plots in up market places whose value goes up everyday? Check with those countries who give us grants, what do they do?.
At the level of investment whom should we encourage and facilitate? Those producing mineral water or those in textile industry that convert our cotton into textile etc and those that turn our hides and milk into consumable products? Should we reward RDCs etc better than nurses and doctors?.
Political leaders better than professionals? Should we allocate scholarships to a student with 3 ‘As in Luganda, Runyakitara and Arabic or a student with BCC in Physics, Math and Chemistry, taking an engineering course? These are not easy questions but we must consistently and persistently address them.
The writer is former Minister of Education and Sports-Republic of Uganda and Former Secretary General of the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA).
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