Academic gloom in Ghana
Our special education correspondent visits the three university campuses in Ghana and files a report on the state of the country's institutions of higher learning which is anything but cheerful.The campus of the University of Ghana, Legon, is generally regarded as one of the most handsome in Africa. Certainly, at the time of its construction, during the heyday of Ghana's prosperity, no expenses were spared to make its buildings to stand the test of time, and even of earthquakes. The grounds were beautifully landscaped and a great variety of trees and plants from various parts of the tropical world were planted to further its beauty.
A great measure of self-sufficiency was also envisaged continuing the tradition of Achimota School - and the University was not only to supply its own power and water, it also had its own sewage plant, telephone exchange, buttery, estate yard and even a bio-gas plant; last, but not least, it had farms both near and far away, which were not only centres for research, but which supplied to the academic community large quantities of food.
Most of all these are still there, but generally in a state of neglect and disrepair. Telephones have been silenced for more than 7 years now, water and electricity supplies are at best erratic, University farm-products have long ceased to reach campus. Weeds and elephant-grass are overgrowing everything.
No doubt, the University of Ghana started as a rather elitist institution for a few hundred brilliant students; a "slavish copy of Ox-bridge" it has been called, with its high table dinners served on silver platters to gowned dons and students. That style too has disappeared, and that is perhaps one of the least lamented losses of the last years.
Nowadays several thousand students live on a campus designed for a few hundred, in over-crowded and dilapidated halls. Hall cutlery and crockery has mostly disappeared and students now bring their own spoons and knives and the one splendorous dining halls have become a kind of cavernous chop-bars.
This academic year started with the announcement that the feeding subsidy for each student had been increased institutions. from 20 to 34, but the authorities candidature of the search na admitted in the same breath that that amount is hardly enough to supply students with two meals per day, and that they are therefore expected to cater for themselves with regard to the third.
If physically Legon shows increasing signs of poverty and neglect, morally and intellectually the situation is even worse. There is a general atmosphere of apathy and despondency. So far the academic year has progressed quietly and nobody wants to rock the boat unnecessarily. The occupation of the University by "militants" in 1983 and subsequent long-lasting closure is still too fresh in the memory.
What most lecturers have in common is that they are overworked and underpaid, and they therefore have no more time and energy for protests. They rather spend their time on moon-lighting farming or applying for jobs abroad.
There is still a deep-seated suspicion lingering between the "revolution- aries" of various hues and non- revolutionaries at all levels. "Revolutionary' interference was recently ill-disguised in the affair of the election of a new Vice-Chancellor. Ever since the departure of the last substantive Vice-Chancellor, the University of Ghana has been kept in a state of suspense, and when the great crisis of the "occupation" came, the Pro-Vice Chancellor had to face the storm virtually alone, and it must be said that he did make the best of it.
Eventually, the Academic Board set up a "search party" which was to recommend a number of candidates to the University Council, which in the meantime had also been transformed to suit the taste of the political authorities, short of the imposition of a straightforward Interim Management Committee" as has been imposed on so many other institution. Eventually, the candidature of the search committee’s first choice as the person to fill the post was rejected under political pressure.
One would therefore have expected the University Council to appoint the second choice of the search party, but no; after several meetings had been cancelled for various reasons, the Council found one day a convenient quorum of mostly non-academic who members, including the President of the "Search Party", "surprisingly" all voted for a candidate who had been quite far down on the list of candidates proposed by the search-party, but who had some revolutionary antecedents and was clearly favoured by "the Castle".
It took a while before the media were allowed to broadcast this piece of news, but the occasion was also used to provide the opportunity to refer to Chairman Rawlings for the first time as Chancellor of the University and in that quality as Head of State. Technically, there is nothing wrong: the new V-C was duly elected. The elections were not rigged, someone remarked, but the voters were. An issue like this might, a few years ago, have brought about serious controversies, but apart from a poorly attended meeting of UTAG, the professional association of lecturers which registered protests about these procedures, everything has remained utterly calm.
What most lecturers have in common is that they are over-worked and under-paid, and they therefore have no more time and energy for protests. They rather spend their time on moon-lighting, farming or applying for jobs abroad.
Whilst the teaching staff continues to diminish in number, that of the students rather shows an upward trend. One would expect prospective Ghanaian intellectuals to have little confidence in the future, watching their poverty-stricken teachers; in reality, education in Ghana still is dirt cheap in comparison with that in other countries, and many Ghanaian graduates have no other intention than using their newly acquired degrees and knowledge abroad, and consequently there are now more Ghanaian doctors working in West Germany alone than in the whole of Ghana.
Whilst the staffing situation is desperate - not more than about 40% of the required number of lecturers is available "progressives" continue to push Prof. Okonjo's hobbyhorse of "double intake" and other new fangled projects aiming at making the University more "productive", conveniently forgetting that as a result they are already doing more than double the work for far less than half (reasonable)| pay.
The most unfortunate effect of this is, that there is indeed a conservative tendency among Ghanaian academics: they simply do not get the time and the resources to keep up with modern trends in their various academic fields, and, naturally, if "progress" is politically imposed from above, one's instinctive reaction is to be anti- progressive.
In spite of all revolutionary slogans about the "interests of the common man," it is hardly a secret that the PNDC regime is increasingly sliding towards trade liberalization, known to the true revolutionary firebrands as capitalist exploitation. The Accra streetscene is becoming more colourful than it has been in years, with tins of Kraft cheese and assorted drinks vying for a place on shelves and tables.
The IMF recipes of liberalization and devaluation may be excellent bite for foreign investing fish, but is the bitter part of the IMF pill only to be swallowed by the handful of teachers, nurses and civil servants who have not yet joined the general exodus? Does the IMF prescribe a policy whereby honest intellectuals first be weeded out, leaving only a few corrupt ones who manage to survive on salaries worth less than £40 per month (at the present official exchange rate of the Cedi) to profit perhaps from an eventual salary increase already long overdue?
Primary school teachers' salaries haven't even yet been adapted to the minimum wage of C25 per day, let alone to the current minimum wage of €70, which is more than a professor currently earns per day. Not that those C70 per day is realistic for either a daily rated labourer or a professor: it is openly admitted in the media that these days' no farm-hand will work for less than C250 per day.
Yet, the Government continues to appeal, as usual, to "patriotism' on the part of teachers, exhorting them to show revolutionary "hardwork", something quite different from hard work, and to have something to do with posing in front of cameras with brooms and shovels near open gutters.
Prominent revolutionaries have even gone to the extent of comparing Ghana's brain-drain with the slave trade, forgetting perhaps that there are in the slave trade as in any other trade, sellers as well as buyers. Indeed, who is to be held responsible for "shipping" 500 teachers to Libya by contract or agreement with that brotherly revolutionary country? Such contracts were known in the 17th and 18th centuries as asientos! The old excuse for the African sellers of slaves was that they "lived in darkness and did not realise what they were doing".
We may assume that in present day Ghanaian government circles it is sufficiently known that a family can't live on less than £1 per day, not even in Ghana; that by pursuing a policy of scandalously under-paying intellectuals it is encouraging the brain-drain, ie "selling slaves".
In itself the brain-drain need not be such a bad thing for Ghana; as long as the whole economy is in a depressed state, it is better to have one's intellectuals profitably employed abroad than unemployed (or under- employed) at home. In this way, they are at least able to give their children, who one happy day may return to Ghana, a good education. It could even be argued that 8 the increasing illiteracy in the rural areas may slow down the drift of rural folk to the cities.
But these are assumptions of the devil's advocate; along similar lines one could argue that no food should be sent to famine-stricken areas, because "there would only be more and more mouths to feed". It may be the Ghanaian's inordinate passion for education which has caused the present impasse: people will go to any length to get education, and to put up with any kind of hardship in order to claim the status of a teacher or civil servant.
Meanwhile, Ghana may be on its way towards economic recovery, but it would be very sad indeed if that were achieved at the cost of intellectual, educational and moral collapse. There is a desperate shortage of books and stationery for primary schools, which often even have to do without furniture, and teachers absent themselves continuously from their classes in order to attend various kinds of business without which they could. not possibly survive.
Secondary schools are faced with similar problems and have added to that worse staffing problems; the boarding schools furthermore have the problems of supplies of water, food, power etc, similar to those of the Universities. The excuse for not increasing salaries of teachers at various levels may be that if the salaries of teachers are increased, those of the civil service have to be increased too, and that the latter first needs to be "weeded out". Education needs no "weeding out", to the contrary.
If Government remains adamant and refuses to pay realistic salaries, it may well find that the whole educational system will collapse, which would be a greater disaster even than economic collapse. At this moment a new generation of "intellectuals" is emerging who may have the "paper qualifications" required, but whose standard of education is already remarkably lower than that of a previous generation. What about future generations? If the trend is not drastically changed soon, Ghana will end up producing the kind of "bush" intellectuals upon whom Ghanaians used to look down so much.
