The Sunday Mail
State universities are a huge investment and an immense resource mostly created after independence.
Quite justifiably, President Mnangagwa wants this national investment to produce results beyond just creating a well-educated population that can work in existing entities, and wants the resource to be used to the maximum for the development of Zimbabwe.
Since assuming office, the President has pushed hard for a double-track upgrade of the whole university system.
First, there was that pressure, now formally expressed as the heritage-based Education 5.0 and extended down the line into the school system, to widen the range of the teaching side.
The days when universities handed out degree certificates to show a student had mastered a subject to the required level, and so could be short-listed for job interviews, was considered very limiting. That role has not been abandoned, since students do need to work hard to understand and master a subject, but education cannot end there.
They also now have to learn, and often this means directed experience, to apply and use that knowledge and further to be able to apply it in innovate ways, often with others of perhaps different backgrounds, to create new practical applications. The stress here is on innovation and practicality. Theory is important, but it is the starting point. The idea that a university was the necessary starting point to get a good job, with good jobs to be created for graduates, and the corollary that graduate unemployment was a disaster, was very old-fashioned and not really the prime purpose of higher education.
Under the new concept, higher education was even more importantly the platform from where graduates could dive into the real world and create and innovate — using the fact, theory and thinking patterns of their formal education to build something better than just what was inherited.
The other thread of the new system was that universities should themselves take a lead in this practical application process, at the highest level. Every university, even the smaller ones, has a large pool of some of the most intellectually talented Zimbabweans, and furthermore, a pool that has shown via higher degrees, an ability to extend the frontiers of knowledge. A doctorate requires original thinking at a fairly high level.
In addition, a university brings together within this pool a large number of disciplines, so there is breadth, as well as depth, although to be practical, that breadth requires people to work together and not just sit in isolation or talk around the tea table in their own department. Different disciplines, and the expansion of theoretical knowledge, require a number of insights as these are applied.
So, President Mnangagwa, as the practical measure to use that breadth and depth and pooling of insights, insisted that each of the State universities establish an innovation hub, and that to be expanded to a business park to commercialise the innovations, that is, to develop the surrounding business systems to make them viable.
It is all very well to create a new process, or a new use for a particular raw material, or figure out a new product to perform something being done by some expensive import, but that new process or new product has to not only be technically viable but also economically viable, hence the combination of innovation and business.
There are other ways of moving from the practical application in an innovation hub to a commercially viable product sold in the wider world. Zimbabwe has good patent laws, for example, so a new product developed in an innovation hub can be licensed for manufacture.
As President Mnangagwa has stressed in other forums outside the universities, industry, mining and agriculture can commission practical research from the tertiary institutions to solve their own challenges. It is a two-way process and not limited to a one-way flow of ideas.
But the crucial point, and this President Mnangagwa emphasised at Great Zimbabwe University when he commissioned the innovation hub there at the end of last week, is that universities have to use their immense intellectual resources in practical ways for the economic development of Zimbabwe.
He once again was upset over attitudes that Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular should be solely recipients of research and technology from the developed world, a one-way flow, whereby developing countries just copy, and their universities just regurgitate what innovators create in developed countries. The flow needs to be in both directions.
We do not, and must not, cut ourselves off from global research and development, but we need to be part of it, and in particular need to concentrate on areas where we have our advantages and have our needs. Every country, every society, every community is different, which perhaps explains why so much of our practical and original research and development in the past started with agriculture, where what works in say, the US or Europe or even South Africa, definitely does not work on Zimbabwean soils in a Zimbabwean climate.
But we need that innovation, that creativity and that determination to come up with practical solutions right across the economy, so that our economy can grow and produce more for the benefit of all our people. President Mnangagwa and his Government have created the necessary systems through widening and deepening the universities. Now they, and this means those large numbers of extra researchers and students who make up a university, need to respond and do the incredible quantity of the hard work required.
