AFRICA UNDER SCRUTINY: WHERE DO OUR GRADUATES DISAPPEAR TO?

By Isaac Meso

When I joined this nostalgic system of education almost two decades ago, my primary school teacher, Mr Karuku used to punish us so harshly us and when we asked why he did, he gave a vague explanation. He said we were offspring of a dark continent and that education was brought to us by the white man to bring light to our dark continent. By caning us we could appreciate the importance of education and thank the whites for bringing this ‘light’ to us.

Apparently today Africa is still referred to as the Dark Continent and ranked among the poverty-ridden continents in the world today. The number of graduates who have cleared from universities in Africa since I was a kid is just record-breaking and this number continues to rise with each passing day. The million dollar question therefore remains, if education was meant to bring ‘light’ to our continent, where do all these graduates disappear to once they hit the job market? Why haven’t we received this light in terms of development despite these graduates having been refined and repackaged to bring change and development once they are released into the corporate world.

After doing an in-depth analysis of the issue, three key factors emerged to have contributed to Africa remaining in the dark ages despite producing the best scholars the world could ever have.

Conformity to Status Quo
Conformity to status quo is one of the reasons our graduates haven’t brought the change and development our continent really yearns for. For instance take a graduate who has been employed in a company where simple ethics such as time management have been thrown out the window. Instead of this fresh graduate exercising the discipline of time management he/she learnt in a Human Resource class, he ends up following the same tradition set by fellow workers. This usually impacts negatively on productivity of a company and in the long run affecting country’s economic growth.

Corruption
Corruption has been named as the number one threat towards development in Africa. In Kenya, for instance, it has plagued almost every sector of economy. In fact I won’t be surprised if one day our President calls a press conference to declare it a national catastrophe. I will hail the TJRC report presented to the President the other day but I am not certain that any change will occur.

Now here we have a fresh graduate, who has been handed the finance docket to control. The largest some of money he has ever handled is probably the 18K he got from HELB while still in campus While still a new employee, this graduate is presented with a 2 million bribe by some organisation which wants its tender to pass the vetting process. It is these underhand deals that compromise the integrity of our graduates.

Many young graduates enter the job market with the vow to be corruption-free only for the tentacles of bribery and underhand deals to catch up with them. Once this happens, the fire of fighting corruption is soon extinguished and replaced by the demon of wealth accumulation and embezzlement of public funds.

Greed
In Africa greed has manifested itself through various leaders who use power to rip off the poor in the quest to amass more wealth. Today, leaders in various African governments are still being controlled by this powerful and evil force. This greed has also affected some of our fresh graduates once they hit the corporate world. Once they have been introduced into the ‘loop’ leaving these lucrative deals becomes a nightmare.

Once they get rooted to these vices, they end up pissing on the very same organisational policies they had vowed to protect. These graduates soon metamorphose into African leaders and this status quo is maintained from one generation to another. This clearly explains why Africa has remained a dark continent despite the best brains it has produced over the years.

However, starting today, we are going to do things different. We are going to break this vicious cycle of corrupt, greedy and complacent graduates. I therefore seek your indulgence in this matter as comrades and graduates-to-be because it starts with us if we are to bring ‘light’ in our dark continent.