I agree with the call for curricula to be vehicles for furthering national development. The education system should be harmonized in such a way as to provide effective linkages to the virtually inexhaustible areas of courses and disciplines out there to pool them for national development and progress.

The curricula should spare no effort in pruning quixotic content and miseducation and pay attention to national need and deficiencies, while not compromising on the need to produce students that are free from stereotyped ways of thinking. Graduates from tertiary institutions should be able to face the labour market with well-harnessed creative minds and skills that reduce dependence on white-collar jobs.

Technical education should be prioritized, as it is capable of producing the needed workforce for manufacturing and industrialization. Poor education and miseducation are contributing to the high level of unemployed and unemployable youths on the continent.

If the curricula are important to the education system, the quality of its teaching personnel is no less important. Teachers should be able to think beyond their certificates and engender rigorous and productive thinking in their pupils and students. Our tertiary institutions are full of teachers with impressive certificates. The university system in Nigeria goes to the extremity of requiring a minimum of a PhD to qualify for a teaching position in any of its public universities, even for practice-based disciplines like law, medicine, engineering and accounting. Faculties and departments in tertiary institutions are full of Professors.

Although it may be unreasonable or disrespectful to ask about what they contribute beyond the teaching and instruction of students, it may be fair to wonder why they have not been a reliable source of solutions to societal and national problems. Why are we still dependent on imported solutions to such problems as Ebola and COVID-19, for instance? Why is it not common for them to provide scientific and technological solutions to our peculiar socio-economic and environmental problems?

Inversely, why would the same set of less achieving personnel leave Africa and excel in the West to the extent of being in the vanguard of scientific and technological breakthrough in the West? It is not difficult to notice the negative effects of poor investment in education on the continent. National development is known to be proportional to a country’s investment in education.

Students will benefit, in their development and approach to the use of knowledge, from an environment of teachers with a global competitive drive and spirit. Students will want to be inventors and world-beaters if they are taught by inventors and world-beaters. The teaching staff should illuminate today’s world instead of getting stuck in a world that no longer exists.

You cannot be relevant in today’s highly competitive cutting-edge world with a certificate generated by examinations on phenomena that are no longer relevant to today’s world. The teaching staff should also push students to discover themselves. Students should be made to know that being teachable can give one a high grade but will not guarantee success in life. Success in life requires more.

There is a genius in everyone, but it takes efforts to discover that genius. That is why most inventors and persons who have pushed boundaries and have gifted us the civilization we are enjoying are people who fashioned their curricula, teach, examine and grade themselves. They are people who are not comfortable with ordinary or regular things. Students are naturally affected by an indolent academic environment where the teaching staff see degrees and certificates as ends. Reliance and undue emphasis on certificates kill initiatives and creativity, which may explain why some teachers live entirely on their salaries and do not strive to produce sellable knowledge and services.

Until our school system starts producing risk and opportunity takers, we shall continue to rely on the West for the solutions to our problems and our colonization will persist.

From dysfunctional families and schools, our next port of call is the continent’s abysmal leadership. Developing a well-educated and morally sound skilful youthful population will help, but would not guarantee accelerated development for the continent under the present crop of rapacious leaders and governance system. Africa has the most incompetent and corrupt political leaders in the world. Many of them are nothing but bandits whose usefulness does not go beyond feeding the egos of their tribal people.

In the face of mounting development concerns, many of them are pursuing anti-democratic and ruinous tribal agendas. Not many of them are putting out themselves to harmonize the energies and efforts of business actors and intellectual elites towards a concerted development plan. Unlike the first set of postcolonial political leaders, the continent’s crop of leaders lacks vision and the necessary sense of urgency for the development of their respective countries. Except for a few countries, the continent cannot boast of leaders with exceptional character and sterling leadership qualities to pilot national development.

The real problem with Africa

Leaders with ideas, visions and developmental action plans are in the minority. Development is dependent on leadership with qualities and skills to unify a country along the lines of sound and sustainable developmental ideas and action plans. Unfortunately, what we have are divisive leaders who by traits and character endanger suspicion and distrust among the people.