The Air Lock in Our Education System

This column has come in slightly behind deadline. But I had a good excuse. I was busy fixing an air lock in the plumbing system in my house. An air lock is an annoying little thing, which infects your piping and makes sure you have no water in your taps even when there is lots of water in the tanks and pipes. Fixing an air lock is not a very difficult affair – it involves lots of patience and lots of mops, seeing as how messy it can be. But it is one of the only plumbing problems that can be sorted out by an amateur such as myself, without leaving a house flooded and a repair bill in the hundreds of thousands.

It got me thinking on the old quandary in Western countries. Plumbers and electricians are some of the highest paid blue-collar workers in those countries, because of the skills they hold, the years of apprenticeship, and the fact that, in many cases, they must hold a licence to practice legally. Plumbers make quite a tidy bundle. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, plumbers in America have median pay of more than $23 an hour, well more than twice the minimum wage.

The point of this is not to speak about plumbers, or to teach you how to repair an air lock (you would have to pay me a pretty penny for that). It is about the mismatch of skills in an economy such as ours, the inadequacies and wrongheadedness of our education system, and the misplaced priorities of elites in Kenya. There are also the dangers of resource politics. All this from an air lock in my water pipes.

It has been said before, but it bears repeating: Kenya has gotten it wrong when it comes to figuring out what education to impart for a changing economy. The last time we had a proper, nationwide discussion over the content and type of education we need was more than thirty years ago, and the result was President Moi’s imposition of the 8-4-4 system. People of a certain age will tell you stories of boys struggling with knitting needles, or girls sullenly planing planks of wood, all in the hope that we would produce 14-year-olds who had the ability to employ themselves and others. It was a mistaken answer to a legitimate concern, but at least we asked ourselves questions as a country.

Since then, the big conversations concerning education have been to do with teachers’ strikes, and half-hearted discussions about whether to begin the school year in January or in September. The only concession to the needs of today’s economy is the discussion of providing computers to pupils, a discussion which was badly thought-out, and badly marketed.

It is at the level of tertiary education, however, where some our most significant failings have occurred. ‘Universities’ of all sizes and competencies have proliferated in the country. Many do not merit the term, seeing as they provide no intellectual leadership of any kind. And their priorities are pretty clear when you see how keen they are to recruit students into expensive part-time programmes, and the sheer commercialisation evident in the sprouting up of campuses all over the place.

What’s been forgotten is the middle element. Vocational teaching is dead, or at the very least on life support. Polytechnics have been converted into university campuses, and the skills required for an industrialising economy are nowhere to be found. Thus the dearth of plumbers, and skilled welders, metalworkers and mechanics. This deficit will become even more acute as we begin exploiting the minerals that have been discovered all over the continent.

The elites in places where oil, coal and gas have been discovered are preparing to launch a loud offensive against the companies which will be engaging in mining and drilling for these resources, instead of strategising on how to position their young people to take advantage of the opportunities. There will be jobs aplenty when production begins, but these will end up being imported from abroad because there are no skilled people to take these jobs up locally. A welder in the oil industry is not just a sooty fellow who’s handy with an arc welder or a blowtorch – this is someone who understands metallurgy and computational thermodynamics. Instead of elites (and the country at large) sponsoring bright young people to courses in these skills, they will be very busy politicking about outsiders ‘invading’ their territory, and the paucity of jobs to locals.

Even then, the world is changing, as South Africa has learned to its great cost. The strike in the platinum mining sector, which has just ended, was about increased wages to miners in the sector. Justified as the demands were, companies such as Anglo American have decided to divest from the country altogether, rather than pay more in increased labour costs. And this is in a country that has more than a century of experience in dealing with mining companies (many of which were founded there). What hope is there for us to negotiate a good jobs deal out of our extractive minerals sector when we’re rank amateurs at this?

The policy conversation that needs to happen, then, is an urgent one, and one that needs to involve us all. In the meantime, though, pay me, and I will show you have to fix an air lock.

Also published in the Business Daily on July 29 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/The-air-lock-in-our-education-system/-/539548/2400640/-/uvfmkz/-/index.html