Prime
P7 failures make good slaves
Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- ‘‘A directive against fees increments is doctrinaire hypocrisy”
Does the proverbial glass watcher call us, ordinary Ugandans, half-geniuses or half-idiots? Either way, we are often expected to buy into the kind of stuff the pigs preached to their less gifted comrades in Animal Farm. Like the fantasy of equality.
I have listened with amazement to people talking passionately about education. They are deeply troubled by two things:
One: A high rate of failure (including ungraded ‘passes’) at Primary 7 level.
Two: Very high school fees (including mandatory additional costs and physical articles listed as requirements) at secondary school level.
These Ugandans want their children to have a good education, at reasonable cost. At the back of their minds, they want this education to help their children get into respectable jobs that pay enough to ensure a decent lifestyle.
When too many children fail exams, and/or school fees are too high, more Ugandans get knocked off that dream train.
In short, fewer Ugandans will qualify to live like George Orwell’s pigs.
What amazes me is that many ordinary Ugandans seem to think that the pursuit of quality education and a decent job is a straightforward matter. Without clear evidence, they assume that even their rulers want every Ugandan child to acquire a good education and target respectable employment.
They assume that they are only challenged by the method of reaching a common goal.
Those without illusion know that the very educated and well-to-do are difficult to rule.
So, instead of spreading high knowledge and wealth, limit access to them. Celebrate ageing Bush War foot soldiers and hype latter-day ‘fishermen’.
This mindset will create a low performance economic environment, with limited purchasing power.
Such an environment will not generate enough decent serious jobs. So, it is not necessary, and it is even potentially dangerous, to give too many people a quality education. Otherwise they will demand good jobs that are not there.
A smart ruler instinctively knows that where good serious productive jobs are few, multiplying well-paying parasitic political jobs buys him more mileage on ‘The Main’.
Clearly, the system will leave millions only employable as slaves.
Fortunately, the people in both serious essential jobs and well-paying political jobs need slaves; slaves to clean and cook; slaves to carry their bags in different places; slaves to polish their boots and so on.
The rest of the world also needs slaves for domestic tasks robots cannot yet do, or do cheaply.
So, the slaves left over by affluent Ugandans can be exported.
Super ‘more equal’ Ugandans paying tens of millions of shillings per term at international schools are not complaining at all.
Less ‘more equal’ Ugandans paying two or three million are registering only qualified protest. It is my fellow ordinary Ugandans who are screaming, because they do not understand that the education system is doing exactly what our policymakers have engineered it to do, separating the ‘more equal’ citizens from the slaves.
In a high inflationary environment, do owners of private schools inherently have less right to make a profit than the owners of private hospitals or the makers of floor tiles and road surfaces?
But then, does a government that reportedly wants to spend Shs370 billion (yes, billion) on 10 acres of a city ‘swamp’ for a temporary petty vendors’ market have the mathematics or the moral authority to question a school operator who inflates the prices of school requirements?
A directive against fees increments is doctrinaire hypocrisy, and possibly another tool for lowering educational standards even further, enabling the system to produce more/cheaper slaves for export.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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