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We are throwing away a whole generation

May 28, 2007

Africa risks losing its best, brightest as universities struggle in crisis and unrest looms

Lydia Polgreen

New York Times

DAKAR, Senegal–Thiany Dior usually rises before dawn, tiptoeing
carefully among thin foam mats laid out on the floor as she leaves the
cramped dormitory room she shares with half a dozen other women. It was
built for two.

In the vast auditorium at the law school at
Cheikh Anta Diop University, she secures a seat two rows from the
front, two hours before class.

If she sat too far back, she
would not hear the professor’s lecture over the two tinny speakers, and
would be more likely to join the 70 per cent who fail their first- or
second-year exams at the university.

Those who arrive later
perch on cinderblocks in the aisles, or strain to hear from the gallery
above. By the time class starts, 2,000 young bodies crowd the room in a
muffled din of shuffling paper, throat clearing and jostling.

Outside, dozens of students – early arrivals for the next class – mill about noisily.

"I cannot say really we are all learning, but we are trying,” said Dior. "We are too many students.”

Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a
revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and
engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing.

They are
victims of overcrowding, too little money, mismanagement and trends in
international development that have favoured primary education over
higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young
people than ever toward the already-strained institutions.

The
decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from African countries to
seek their education and fortunes abroad. It is depriving dozens of
nations of homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty.

As
a result, universities across Africa have become hotbeds of discontent,
occupying a dangerous place at the intersection of politics and violent
unrest.

In Nigeria, for example, elite schools have been
overrun by secret societies that have become violent criminal gangs. In
Ivory Coast, student union leaders played a large role in stirring up
xenophobic sentiment that led to civil war.

The Commission for
Africa, a British government research organization, said in a 2005
report that African universities are in a "state of crisis" and are
failing to produce the professionals desperately needed to develop the
poorest continent.

Far from being a tool of social mobility, the
repository of a nation’s hopes for the future, Africa’s universities
have instead become warehouses for a generation of young people for
whom society has little use and who can expect to be just as poor as
their uneducated parents.

"Without universities, there is no
hope of progress, but they have been allowed to crumble," said Penda
Mbow, a historian and labour activist at Cheikh Anta Diop who has
struggled to improve conditions for students and professors. "We are
throwing away a whole generation.”

Even those lucky enough to
graduate will struggle to find a job in their depressed economies. As
few as one-third of African university graduates find work.

The
disarray of Africa’s universities did not happen by chance. In the
1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that
would drive development in the young nations of newly liberated Africa,
and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses, research
facilities, scholarships and salaries for academics.

But
corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that swept
much of Africa in the 1970s. In the retrenchment, universities were
among the first institutions to suffer. As idealistic post-colonial
governments gave way to more cynical and authoritarian regimes,
universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and
elitist airs, became a nuisance.

When the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund came to bail out African governments in the
1980s with their tough economic reforms, higher education was usually
low on the list of priorities.

Fighting poverty required basic
skills and literacy, not doctoral students. But money flowing into
primary and secondary education set up a time bomb: as more young
people got a basic education, more wanted to go to college.

At
Cheikh Anta Diop, for example, 9,000 students earned a baccalaureate in
Senegal in 2000, entitling them to university admission. By 2006, there
were more than twice that. The university cannot handle the influx. Its
budget is $32 million (U.S.), less than $600 per student.

Attempts
to reduce the student population by admitting fewer students are seen
as political suicide – student unions play a big role in elections and
Senegal’s leaders are fearful of widespread discontent among educated
youth.

"They fear us because we are the young, and the future
belongs to us," said Babacar Sohkna, a student union leader. "But where
is our future? We are just waiting here for poverty."

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