Africa's Crumbled Universties

The story in The New York Times, May 20 about the decrypt condition in which universities in Africa struggle to educate the continent’s younger generations is as tragic as it is disturbing. The story portrays the decrypt and over-crowed classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and living quarters as the norm in Africa’s universities. But the most unfortunate issue in that story which show-cased Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop University, in Darkar, is the one that wasn’t mentioned. That issue is the views of the political class in Senegal, whose ineptitude and blatant corruption render what used to be an excellent education system a mere caricature of its past.

One is only saying that the views of a government official could possibly provided the necessary insight to prove that the unfortunate situation of affairs in the Cheikh Anta Diop University is likely to persist for an indefinite period. Senegal is not alone. The rest of the continent except perhaps South Africa and Botswana, are in similar conditions. In most of the continent, the situation may be even worse than it is in Senegal. There are places on the continent including Nigeria, which realizes stupendous amounts of dollars daily from the sale of hydrocarbons, where the educational system has all but collapsed. In Nigeria, universities stay closed longer than they stay open in any given year. So much that a course of study meant to be completed in four years take more than six or eight years to be completed. The reason being that aggrieved professors are perennially on strike action aimed at pressuring the government to improve their conditions of service. Yet, everywhere, the political class in each society continues in their evil ways to run the future of their societies into the dust.

If the story in Senegal is scratched a little deeper, it will reveal that the children of Senegal’s political class are all in universities abroad where they study in comfort. Their parents prefer to steal the public coffers dry, and use the money not only to educate them abroad in comfort, but to also buy real estate abroad. At the same time, the health and education sectors where the money is meant for are left in the decrypt conditions portrayed in The Times story.

All said and done, the harsh conclusion that can quickly be drawn from the unfortunate conditions that obtain in African universities is that the continent will remain in dire straits for a long time to come. A continent that ignores the education of its young generations is simply destroying itself by the slice.