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| Professor Amon Murwira |
Moses Ziyambi
HARARE – The Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Professor
Amon Murwira has warned that no industrialisation will come Zimbabwe’s way
unless local people, in partnership with their own institutions of higher and
tertiary learning, take charge of the effort.
Speaking to members of the media
at his offices in Harare this week, Murwira said the job-looking mentality
rampant in the psyche of citizens ought to be dispensed with.
“Industries come from our
deliberate efforts at higher and tertiary education to grow certain industrial
pipelines and this is exactly how a country industrializes. That’s what
independence means; it means doing your things and being able to produce your
things,” said Murwira.
He said the education system
should no longer be about teaching numeracy and literacy, warning that gone were
the days of looking forward to foreigners setting up all the factories.
“Schools and universities are not
there for decoration, they are serious sources of industrialisation. They are
the springs of industry. All water comes from a spring and every industry comes
from a spring called higher and tertiary education institutions. So these must
be geared towards that.
“But as you know during the
Education 3.0 era, we were training people to work in industries developed at
Cambridge and Oxford. So they would produce and they bring it here, and we go
and work. It would look like these people are so amazing, they are just giving
us industries, and we are working,” lamented Murwira.
He said the new education thrust
adopted by the government was geared at industrialising the country by
developing local capabilities.
“Education 5.0 talks about
industrialisation; and industrialisation talks about a lot of capabilities that
we need for business development, which basically means all our institutions.
It doesn’t have to be measured only by the number of certificates that they
give; not by the number of graduate papers that they write but by the number of
start-ups that they produce.
“Start-ups are businesses that
result from our research culture. As a former colony, we have always seen
industries but nobody told us the source of those industries. Ultimately the
source of any industry is an institution of higher and tertiary education. But
those sources were remote to this country; they were not in this country,” said
Murwira.
