Random Thoughts on Segmentation and Integration

So…

Last Friday we had a whole longer-than-usual article about the fees.  A lot of critics put up their comment and the most important of the criticisms was that I seemed not to have picked a side. To respond to that (masiku ano ndiziyankha), that was a deliberate move for obvious reasons.

Fast forward to this Friday, the President (after reading my article, I think) has responded by granting the University of Malawi Students’ Union leaders an audience. I am told the meeting resulted in the reduction of the fees by a “whooping” K50, 000.00, which of course has attracted a whole range of reactions from across the nation. Some are cursing the UMSU leadership while others are giving them a thumbs-up. Some (of us) are saying that the granting of the audience was a cosmetic gesture considering the margin of the reduction of the fees while on the other end of the spectrum some have silenced us telling us that we should keep our dirty mouths shut because fees has fallen. Well. Vow of silence made.

Immediately after posting and sharing last week’s article I bumped into a politician who was chatting with students about the same fee hike, giving some insights on how best to sail in the tricky waters of the politics surrounding the hike. It was a pretty interesting discussion because the gentleman in question was suggesting the use of some clause in the university council’s press to the advantage of the students. The reason I am sharing this, however is that the discussion took an interesting turn and shifted to the standards of higher education in the country as a whole.

There was a discussion about this whole issue of accommodation in our public universities. Most of you might be aware that accommodation in the public universities is privatized and that most of the students who are supposed to be staying on campus are living elsewhere, having an obvious negative impact on their academic life. During the discussion about accommodation, the gentleman brought in an issue of the community colleges. He cited that those are being underused as compared to the colleges that train health professionals. This he said considering the heavy work a nurse in training from KCN does at KCH and elsewhere, and the 24 hour call a final year medical student has to do in the Gogo Chatinkha maternity wing. He said that there is little to show of the practical done by our friends, and that it is high time we got them to work in the building of new hostels in our colleges. I know that already some of you are dismissing this as theoretical thinking. I cannot blame you for that, but what his point reminded me was the fact that most of the things in the country are segmented and that we have failed to use various systems to compliment each other for the development of this nation.

Many have at some point questioned why there have been no renovations in the Polytechnic infrastructures when they have a whole lot of students in the faculty of built environment. That is pretty much the same as the example the gentle man in question was giving, but you could say the same about the issue of water problems which we have despite having all the resources, natural and human alike. The sort of blackouts we have when we actually have many untapped renewable sources of energy and supposedly the experts in the same. Yes, we tend to wonder why we do not have a well developed tourism industry when we have what it takes to turn the tide when it comes to natural resources. If you were to think that hard (maybe not that hard), you will get to discover that some of these problems  are still with us because the government, private sector, academics, media and everyone else (including bloggers) have failed to embrace and to act on the fact that a coordinated effort is needed to turn our fortunes around. We give a blind eye to the fact that to the fact that energy provision has an impact on industrialization and that food security has a bearing on education as infrastructure development and internal security do on tourism. End result? We try to sort out each one of these as something that is independent of the other. We all know the results of these unfocused efforts.

Getting it down to the personal level (I always say that the problems we have at a national level are the same as those we have at a personal level in Malawi), most of us do have this problem as we lack an insight on how different aspects of our own life interlock with others. To many, when it is time for career building, everything else suffers and such is the case when others want to prioritize social life. What we sometimes forget is that the sum of all these is what makes a complete human and that if we are to be successful (in the strict definition of the word) positive progress has to be reflected in all these areas and all of these (social, spiritual, financial, academic, etc) have to be complementing each other. Probably high time we got the likes of Pastor Aubrey Mwansinga of the combining spiritual and academic success fame to be teaching us that our academics need  “a bit of God” and the likes of Samson Fiadoh (he has recently added an “h” to the surname, I think)  to tell us the important link between social life and personal finances.

Probably one of those things we don’t pay attention to but still practice, but worth noting is the fact that the perfection of the art of integrating different parts of our life for a bigger and common goal helps one be more disciplined, increasing the likelihood of attaining one’s goals.

This is just one of those reflections. Truly random, yet food for the sober mind.

By the way, are the salaries in? That is for my friends in the civil service.

Nice weekend.