Re: African Universities Do Not Make First 100 in Rankings

I am still addicted to BBC news even though CNN is closer to me now. For inexplicable reasons, I have cultivated the habit of validating any news report only from the BBC. The same report from other major news channels may be more in-depth, current and very convincing, but the BBC remains my standard. I jokingly mentioned to my colleagues at work that Komla Dumor is my brother, and it seems too late to make amends, because they believe me. At least they do not know me to be a liar. So I am also emboldened to add, rather confidently: “We even attended the same university in Ghana.” They admire his presentation and confidence. They also think really highly of the African university that produced such a gem. Of course, they are not stupid: They know that not everybody can be a gem, and my sloppiness never fails to remind them of that all important truism.

Strangely, they see a resemblance between the two of us. Often when Komla comes on TV, I hear a yell from the next cubicle: “Ben, your brother is on.” A few of them want his phone number. I always tell them that I hardly get to talk to him because of his schedule. What I gather they don’t know is the nature of education in Africa. They are aware that people with degrees from foreign universities often have to pay for Canadian accreditation services that weigh and certify the strength of the degree vis-à-vis the standards in North America. Some of them wonder why a degree from a university is viewed with so much suspicion that employers will not trust it until some confirmation is secured. Others keep their suspicions beyond questions like how many years it takes to complete university in Africa, the cost involved and the kind of jobs a degree attracts.

It is not unexpected that if our degrees suffer recognition problems in the West, the universities that issued them would also suffer difficulties in world rankings. None of our universities (and we are talking about the entire African continent) ranks among the first 100 in the global league. Yet, it is understandable that Africans like Dumor rank among the first in their field everywhere. They stand out–out of their league, triumphing above their system and all the associated problems. They set their own ranking.

I know my colleagues will soon find out that I am no relation to Komla, except for nationality, which means everything to me especially in the context I am situated. What, however, remains true, is that we were year mates at the University of Ghana and also graduated the same year. What kind of university was the University of Ghana when we were there, and how would it compare with the universities in England where I did some postgraduate work, and the Ivy league schools in America, where Komla is a Harvard alumnus. I cannot say much for Harvard but I have always put it out that my foundations at Legon were so strong that any Oxford or Harvard association would have helped very little in whatever I am able to do. That is to say that if you get the beginnings wrong in Africa, Harvard and Oxford cannot correct anything. Soon, the buffoonery would show through and folks would contest your genuine association with that very Ivy League.

How do we get it right at Legon? What did he mean when a World Bank official recently said that we are not building capacity in the areas of education that are crucial to our development? We have always known that we need more technical knowledge to help build, assemble and repair things than the theoretical models that only remain in books. That has been the bane of our woes: That we are not a people that want to build and invent the things we need. Nearly everything: From World Bank policies to over-aged computers and books are handed down from somewhere to us. Yet, our concentration hasn’t changed. We are still not sure how the switch from the traditional to the SSS system has helped our advancement of scholarship. Suddenly, a Masters degree has become a craze, and private universities continue to admit students who would pay and enrol on any course than waste another year at home doing nothing. We are carefully neglecting the trades. We need colleges and technical institutes. College graduates are those who eventually come to form the middle class of many societies. We don’t exactly have a middle class: What we have is the rich, the non-poor and the poor.

The African problem is difficult to describe: We are told the investment in Yale alone is much higher than the GDP of Sierra Leone. Until recently, some computer science students in Ghanaian universities didn’t do much work with computers. There were only a few for some hundred students. Thandika Mkandawire, one of Africa’s finest academics presently teaching at the prestigious London School of Economics, laments the lost years, where Africa missed out on a cycle of growth while other continents invested in higher education. Another academic recounts her experience with African university students photocopying materials from 1950 textbooks. These would be modern graduates all armed with 1950 theories ready to take the world by storm and compete with America, Germany and Japan. Their professors had not authored any of the books. They had their primary and secondary education in difficult circumstances. Suddenly, they are university graduates and the development of their countries depends on them.

Do we need a 10 year economic development plan to fix it? No, we need an educational plan. Education, education, education: Those were Tony Blair’s words when they asked him his vision for Britain. Veep Mahama (I am looking forward to his book) has promised to convert all schools held under trees and improvised structures into good classrooms soon. I am not going to hold him accountable for that. Instead I am going to count the misery and deprivation of the people in our villages who have scrapped through so tightly, living beneath economic reason to even attempt sending their children to school. It is difficult to imagine how a child taught under a tree in a town that has Dawurampong as its capital, would graduate from JSS and proceed to SSS in Assin Fosu and eventually make it to a university in Accra. Where does the girl child in newly independent South Sudan, where there is no educational infrastructure at all, start from?

Maybe we should not care much about university ratings. Would it help our ratings if Harvard set up a campus in Ghana instead of say China or South Korea? What about encouraging African academics in good foreign universities to come home once a while to contribute to the development of scholarship, as the University of Ghana is presently doing? Or we should pin them down to stay and pay them what they get in their universities abroad? That would also mean upping the salaries of their Ghana-based contemporaries. That is where the economics come in: We cannot afford that. So, where does the train end? We come back to the old depressing narrative of the poor man who should have been rich. Maybe we don’t need visionaries anymore; we need their vision.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin, Ottawa, Canada.

bigfrontiers@ymail.com, quesiquesi@hotmail.co.uk