The Sunday Mail
Online Reporter
ACADEMIC experts and tertiary students should afford themselves the freedom to come up with disruptive research and innovations that can change the country’s socio-economic order.
Speaking at the official opening of the University of Zimbabwe’s 2022 Research, Innovation and Industrialisation Week, Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Minister Professor Amon Murwira said there was need for a new order as the colonial legacy is holding the country back.
“Our way of doing things is still influenced by those who once colonised us. In terms of our economic model, our laws, our social life and even our culture, we are operating with the colonialist’s mindset, which is to loot and leave rather than build and stay,” he said.
“It is up to us to change that. We have the minds and the institutions to incubate our local ideas and possibly come up with, let’s say, a home-grown legal system. That is what the President is talking about when he says ‘Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo’.
“So our education is now designed in such a way that we are now learning to create, not learning to work for someone.”
To achieve this, Professor Murwira said, universities have to produce more intellectual property and start-up companies.
Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Permanent Secretary Mrs Virginia Mabhiza said her ministry is playing its part by coming up with new laws that make it easy for university students and researchers to register start-up companies and intellectual properties.
The Research, Innovation and Industrialisation Week, which is now on its fourth day, is running under the theme “Actualisation of a Research-Innovation-Industrialisation Ecosystem Model for Zimbabwe’s Economic Development”, with students and lecturers showcasing a number of innovations.
Professor Murwira and Mrs Mabhiza were joined by Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Deputy Minister Kindness Paradza and other senior Government officials on the tour of exhibition stands.
