What we don’t need

For a start, think of famous parliamentarians, here and elsewhere, who would have been excluded by a rule like this: Rekayi Tangwena, Winston Churchill, Simon Muzenda, Maurice Nyagumbo and many of our early nationalist leaders of whatever party.

Then let’s remember how educational qualifications have been devalued almost worldwide over the past 50 years. Here in Zimbabwe this means O-levels today, ZimSec or other, are worth less than Standard 3 was in 1960. Men who passed Standard 3 in the 1960s (and due to the circumstances of both traditional society and the colonial system, those who got that far were mostly male) had a good broad general education which equipped them for life in the modern world and gave them the basic skills to benefit from the changes they have experienced in the world over the following 50 years.

I admit that may not be true of all, but it certainly is true of quite a large number. By contrast, quite a large number of school leavers who have done four years of secondary school today are not functionally literate; many of them cannot discuss anything intelligently in English, but they have treated, or been taught to treat their mother tongue with such contempt that they can’t hold an intelligent conversation in any language. Their minds have been alarmingly narrowed.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming today’s youth. This is not their fault. They are the victims of an educational system that has been so watered down and automated that it is practically useless. One might suspect that the content of a school course had been spread over a longer time so as to provide jobs for more teachers. I don’t know if that is so, but I have some more sinister suspicions.

All I have said so far applies in many other countries. But there are some special factors affecting us here in Zimbabwe. Much of Africa suffers from simplified English. I knew an English woman teacher in Botswana who used to speak “Special English” for which you only needed to learn 600 words. If that was the syllabus, it helped more students to pass the simplified exam, but it did not help them to read Shakespeare, Dickens, or even the Bible and modern writers in English from Graham Greene to Monica Ali and Chinua Achebe.

That might be an unforeseen result of a well-meaning attempt to help as many students as possible to share the most basic communication in English, but it often doesn’t even achieve that modest aim. (I might add that when I was at school the works of Ian Fleming and James Hadley Chase were not considered to be literature; they do not advance our aesthetic or moral development.)

Zimbabwe suffers further from the ZANUisation of our school syllabus. We can hardly expect intelligent political decisions or policy making from MPs whose knowledge of history is limited to “Robert Mugabe’s struggle against the British”, with other Zimbabwean personalities lucky to get bit parts in the story and nobody else’s history dealt with in any depth.

That’s bad enough, but have you seen the Bible study text that likens Jacob’s tomb at Shechem to the ZANU private shrine in Warren Hills? That book goes on to introduce Israel as a nation in the terms that might have been written by a modern Zionist. Now that could produce a lot of confusion in young readers without a fairly sophisticated education in history.

In Zimbabwe and elsewhere, we don’t need certificated politicians; we need men and women with common sense (and that is quite uncommon), moral principles and practical experience. At first sight, having led a trade union movement out of dependence on the government party is a better qualification than having a string of degrees. That is not the last word, but any more must wait for another week.