Primacy of knowledge in making sense of the future

In his keynote address at the 25th Anniversary of the University of Dar es Salaam in July, 1995, the late Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere presented what may be a provocative position about the role of knowledge in all societies. He argued, “In the 21st century, knowledge will be of far greater importance in determining the standard of living in a nation than will be its wealth in natural resources or its monetary capital”.

I call it provocative because in the currency of the on-going debate in Tanzania about economic empowerment of nationals in the wake of heightened foreign investment in the natural resources sector, Mwalimu’s logic may arouse negativity.

Yet, we do also learn from the distinguished academic, Prof Paul Streeten who wrote a brilliant article some years back entitled, Social Development in Africa-A Focus on People, wherein he postulates that one of the impediments to economic empowerment in Africa is the lack of a mind-set that sees “a healthy, alert, vigorous, well nourished, well educated population as the source of production and productivity.” In his view, the provision of quality education and delivery of better health services is what would best empower Africans and not finance. It is a view that seems to be broadly shared. David Landes in his magisterial book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations points out that “history tells us that the most successful cures for poverty come from within---. What counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity. To people haunted by misery and hunger, that may add to selfish indifference. But at bottom, no empowerment is as effective as self-empowerment”. He goes on to argue that “educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.” In sum, Mwalimu Nyerere carries the day.

Where will the knowledge come from?

However, where would the kind of knowledge, which I believe Mwalimu had reference on for economic empowerment of Tanzanians, come from? In some of my past articles on this column I have touched upon some of the challenges that face the Tanzanian education sector. In view of the importance of knowledge as the game changer and ‘break-out’ driver for economic empowerment of nationals, in the next few articles I will examine what I perceive as the key dimensions in building the kind of knowledge that fits with Tanzania’s new demands, now and in the future.

In his book, Beyond Certainty, the British social and management critic, Charles Handy, observes that “because (the) history is long we feel that the future too will be a long time in coming. We may be surprised --- we don’t have to wait for that future; we can shape it, but there isn’t much time. It would be sad if we missed our future because of our past.” It would indeed be sad to miss our future because the future is actually now, as so well demonstrated by the expression that emerged in the 1990s, ‘back to the future’. It is an expression that heightens the reality and centrality of a future that is not benign; a future that is dynamic, often at dramatic speeds.

A challenging new future

It is a future that manifests itself in the intensification of the globalisation of economics, finance, education and even culture. Information and communication technologies which are also fast changing in complexity and robustness are driving the dynamic of the future, particularly so in the developed and emerging economies.

In these particular economies, e-learning, learning modules that are loadable on IPods and the general use of multimedia now define the growing mode of learning and education delivery. Evidently, the developing world cannot afford to miss such evolving future. In particular, African and Tanzanian universities and institutions of higher learning must lead the process of responding, managing and mastering the challenges of such future, including participating in shaping it.

Let me offer a few perspectives about the dynamic and complex nature of the new global society and how critical it is for the African and, for that matter, the Tanzanian University to understand better and seek to muster such future. In fact, there is a view that even the developed world itself is overwhelmed by the rapidity of change, its severity and unpredictability and struggles to manage it.

Prof Thomas Homer-Dixon has powerfully captured this developed world picture in his book, The Ingenuity Gap: How can we solve the problem of the future? He notes that Western triumphalism, which is based on a remarkable string of economic and political achievements, is evidentially selective and that “problems and issues that don’t fit into this optimistic worldview tend to be downplayed or ignored”.

He proceeds to posit that the successes of the Western world are a result of “a confluence of events and processes that its elites neither controlled nor really understand. Western triumphalism is dangerously self-indulgent, and even delusional.”

Some of the examples Homer offers to reinforce his view tell a major story about the complexity of the environment in which the world finds itself in. He refers to challenges ranging from international financial crises, global climate change to pandemics such as tuberculosis and Aids, challenges which, in his view, “seem to be largely beyond our ken-incomprehensible even to our leaders and specialists.”

A new complex environment

However, for all global societies, it is important to have an appreciation of the complexity of the unfolding environment. In a highly perceptive book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a Lebanese-American, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shocks us all with new thinking about the unthinkable which increasingly will determine how humanity seeks to have a deeper understanding about the world it lives in and about its very survival. Taleb notes: “There are so many things we could do if we focus on anti-knowledge or what we do not know.” He further observes that human ingenuity is constrained by “excessive focus on what we do know: we tend to learn from the precise, not the general.”

His basic thesis is that the world is no longer understandable, explainable or predictable. Yet if we closely examine our higher educational systems and curricula, in all societies, developed and developing, in the context of Taleb’s conjecture, what turns out is that there is too much focus on learning the facts and not the rules. As a consequence, there is the general inadvertent failure to respond to what Taleb describes as “the modern, complex and increasingly recursive environment.”

In his later book, Fooled by Randomness-The Hidden Role of Change in Life and in the Markets, Taleb is even more vicious by pointing out that “it certainly takes bravery to remain sceptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations-scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.” What we need to ask ourselves is whether the historical mission of the university is still relevant to today’s fast changing environment and the new challenges of social and economic transformation? Can the mission breed the knowledge which Mwalimu Julius Nyerere regards as more important than natural resource wealth?

In this and the following think pieces, I shall examine this primary question from three perspectives.

First, the perspective of the relevance and efficacy of the historical mission of the African and Tanzanian university and how the university has performed; second, from the perspective of the national, social and economic challenges that confront the Tanzanian nation- state and of the role of the university within it; and, third, from the perspective of the impact of the complex and dynamic regional and global economic and technology-driven environment.

Finally, I will propose how the Tanzanian university of the future should strategically re-position itself by re-defining its traditional mission in order to respond to the demands of the new economy and the enduring challenges of development.

Historical mission, relevance and efficacy

The African university predates African political independence. Yet the mission of the African university can best be viewed and examined from the context of the post-independence period. It is such mission and how the university has performed that poses burning questions about relevance, quality and effectiveness of the African and Tanzanian university in particular within the broad dimension of national expectations and the social and economic dynamics of transformation. Indeed, the debate about the role of the African university has often centred on the delicateness of, and, sometimes, the debatable balance between the traditional mission of the university which the African university emerged from in terms of its colonial past and the need for the university to serve the new economic empowering objective. In the past twenty five years, this debate has taken a complex character as a result of what Prof Akilagpa Sawyer has described as the “transformations in political economy at both the global and local levels” precipitating a struggle in African universities “to reposition themselves”. There are several ramifications to this debate.

Enter mission of the African university

The core mission of the African university is usually associated with the Unesco/Economic Commission for Africa Conference of University Leaders held in Antananarivo, Madagascar in 1962. That conference emerged with the consensus that the African university should be “a key instrument for national development”. It is important to note, however, that at the political level, the mission of the African university had already been articulated in 1961 by the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.

When inaugurating the Faculty of Law, as part of the University College Dar es Salaam in October 1961, Nyerere stated that “for while other people can aim at reaching the moon and while in future we might aim at reaching the moon, our present plans must be directed at reaching the villages”. Nyerere was, in other words, calling for a university that was, in its output, relevant to local conditions.

Later in June 1963, when inaugurating the University of East Africa as the first Chancellor of that University, Nyerere went further to elaborate that the African University “must be in and of, the community it has been established to serve”. In the next piece, I will examine the emergence of a developmental university.