- Introduction
“The Work of Making Democracy: Building a Culture of Civic Engagement at the University of Minnesota, written out of the recent experiences of civic change in American higher education, brings back a flood of memories. It also suggests a number of parallels to our situation in Africa. In Africa, as well as in the United States, Higher Education needs to become a force for democratization. There is a history to draw upon. This chapter focuses on academy and public scholarship. To do this, the first section deals with my years as a student and how it changed my perspective to become a public scholar as a human rights activist. The second section focuses on my life as an employed academic and the changing nature of Africa’s scholarship and the last section is a conclusion.
- The formative years: Higher Education as the Foundation for Democratic Change in Africa – the case of Nigeria
My journey of self-discovery began in my first year of undergraduate studies at the University of Jos in the Middle Belt of Nigeria with the reading of Walter Rodney’s book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa . It is a penetrating account of humans’ inhumanity to fellow human beings. Rodney’s incisiveness and intellectual depth made me understand the social environment that I grew up in as a black person, an African Nigerian from a peasant background in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. The area suffers from severe environmental degradation and pollution following decades of oil exploration by multinational companies. In spite of its rich natural resources, the people of the Niger Delta live in poverty and misery. These conditions were to shape my life. From a very young age, I felt a restlessness to understand my environment and to do something to change it.
Fellow blacks, Africans and Nigerians even in the late 20th century when I was an undergraduate student in the late 1980s, perpetuated the dehumanization of the African people begun by the Europeans in the 14th century. The dehumanization of the African people was manifested in the very manner in which students lived on my campus. This was brought home to me when two adult female students were allocated to a six-spring bed, and eight students were allocated to a room designed to accommodate two. I was appalled by these conditions, and became an activist in the Students’ Union in an attempt to address them.
I realized that our struggle to improve the living conditions of students on campus must be linked to struggles to improve the general conditions of Nigerians as a whole. In particular I realized that academy provided a platform for exploration of the world, a public function to engage critically with society by providing knowledge and carrying out activities to change that society and improve human welfare.
In my undergraduate days, I was fortunate to have Faculty such as Sam Egwu, Peter Oso-Ezon, and Omofume Onoge who introduced me to two Cs – class and citizenship, empowering and liberating concepts that form the bedrock for my entering academy, and of my politics. Two other Cs, clients and customers, are disempowering. They strip humans of their humanity and citizenship. They emphasize market fundamentalism. Also, I was privileged to belong to a discussion group comprised of students, faculty, professionals, and workers from the surrounding community that examined the role of higher education in society. I learned things that I did not learn in my formal classes. The public mission of academy was a reoccurring theme in our discussions.
After my undergraduate studies, I opted to work with human rights movement.
Most of my colleagues were opposed to work with communities and other civic groups. I recall some of my colleagues at the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) labeled me as “working for the church” rather than “for the CLO”. This was because, as the Coordinator of the Human Rights Education and Empowerment Program, I cultivated active working relationship with the churches, especially the Catholic Church. To me there was no questioning the fact that our message to develop a culture of human rights could reach a larger audience through partnership work with the churches. I drew great inspiration from the words of the assassinated El Salvadorian Archbishop, Oscar Romero, who said that the children of God, whether Catholic or Marxist, were all being debased by the inhuman conditions brought about by repressive regimes and market fundamentalism. Consequently, I took our empowerment programs to the churches, market women, association of journalists (The Nigerian Union of Journalists) and students of higher institutions. I was convinced from the onset that through such multi-class alliances, we can contribute to the democratization of our society. Through these multiple alliances, the CLO were able to work with these organizations around specific issues. One of the consequences of these is that some of these organizations established human rights committees to champion human rights issues that affect their members rather than rely on the few professionals working in the human rights organizations. My maxim was that it is better to teach a human being how to fish rather than give her/him fish. This approach worked perfectly as today, there is increased human rights awareness in Nigeria with different actors working to entrench a human rights culture in the country.
The annulment by the General Babangida military regime of the 1993 Presidential elections provided the first opportunity for most of the human rights groups to make the transition from civil to political society, or at least to narrow the divide between these societies, and by so doing work more closely with more broad based community organizations At this time, the dominant human rights groups, women organizations, academic staff associations, and the student movement formed the Campaign for Democracy (CD) as a united pro-democracy front. Even in the CD, there were two trends. One wanted a narrow agenda of advocacy and litigation, the other wanted mass mobilisation. The latter were predominately ex-students leaders who had gained experiences of mass mobilization especially on campuses. After lengthy debate, we decided to divide Lagos, a city of over 15 million people, into five coordinating and operational zones. I was responsible for Lagos Island, the commercial hub of the city. The mobilization work that we undertook thereafter was to be my most challenging and life-enriching experience. We left our human rights offices to work in the streets with market women, taxi drivers, and the unemployed. We also established links with professional organizations and individuals whom in the past we had dismissed as petty-bourgeois. These engagements served as an important intellectual environment and a political school. We had to learn about neighborhoods, social conditions, and politics.
Our efforts culminated in mass protests, with millions in the streets, calling for the enthronement of democracy through de-annulment of the June 12 presidential election. What was most rewarding and intriguing for me were the resourcefulness, dynamism, and organizational and mobilization skills of the market women. Social activism directly working with the people to change our society eventually led to the demise of the General Babangida military dictatorship. The success of the struggle against military regime was thus informed by “a different kind of politics” characterized by embedded democracy, a cross class alliance of market women, taxi drivers, students and the unemployed, religious groups, and professional organizations and individuals.
Academy was a basis for this transformation… as students leaders we developed a consciousness that education has a public function to perform and that to achieve it, there is a need for partnership between academy – faculty and students alike- and its surrounding community. This civicness and publicness of education were what motivated me to become an academic years latter.
- The Transition to a Full-time Academic and the Dilemma of Africa’s Higher Education
Today, I work at the Graduate School of Public and Development Management, (P&DM) University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. As its founding director, Patrick FitzGerald, points out, it was set up as a “temple to build capacity of post-apartheid governance that is just, efficient and effective for a more humane society”. The school in its early phase was driven by public scholarship. Prof. FitzGerald teased that academics were more of activists, rather than detached academics, contributing to the transformation of South Africa to an inclusive, democratic and just society . In this respect, P&DM was able to engage with activists and equip them to take strategic and leadership positions in both the public and the development sectors. This societal transformation agenda, according to its academic director, Dr Anne Mc Lennan, was what attracted some academics to the school in its formative years . The school was therefore motivated by the need to promote public scholarship. In this respect, prior and experiential learning, community involvement and activism were all criteria recognized for admission into its diploma and masters degree programs. Also, the school was involved in a number of community works as well as engaging with labour unions.
The public scholarship thrust has however, diminished in the last few years and this is evident even in the curriculum. Courses such as Development Management has been replaced with performance management, project management and service delivery to citizens conceived as clients and customers and not as citizenship. Citizens feature in this approach only as passive recipients of government services. The dominant thrust is that of customers, clients and users rather than citizenship. It is this customers’ orientation that shaped the curriculum, according to Ms Wendy Ngoma-Maema, a lecturer in the school . The adverse implication of this is that students are conceived as subjects of the markets. In other words public scholarship of the school is being subordinated to the imperatives of the global market place – or even vestigial, as it is increasingly drawn into the commodification and marketisation of its activities including the curriculum. By this conception, the civic role of the school as a force for democratic consolidation is being changed and gaining access to the school activities is dependent on the ability to pay. In this respect, education has play a major role in societal stratification and class formation in a world Castells (199..) defined as being characterized by two types of workers, generic and programmable workers. Who belong to each group is considerably determined by education. As Carnoy and Castells (1999) have correctly observed,
In a society where education, information and knowledge are the critical sources of wealth and influence, class formation takes place in the classroom. Who gets into the education system determines who gets what capital, communication and political influence (Carnoy and Castells 1999 in Hall, 2001: 224).
Such an approach also changes the way education is viewed. It shifts education from basic services to that of economic infrastructure that serves the needs of the global economy. Hence today, the role of the school is to equip students with the competency and skills to contribute to economic competitiveness of South Africa. In this respect there is a close similarity of Dewey’s (cited in Dowerkin, 1959), description of America’s schools in the late 19th century and P&DM in particular and South African education system in general in the early part of the 21st century. Dewey noted:
While… the development of personality , etc. as the end aim of education, the great majority of those that pass under the tuition of school regard it only as a narrowly practical tool with which to get bread and butter enough to eke out a restricted life (Dworkin, 1959: 48)
By such conception of the role of academy in the post-apartheid South Africa, a new form of colonialism has emerged in the information age. The market has colonialized academy. The primary purpose of the latter is changed from its public scholarship to serving the needs of former – the market. Associated with this development is the hierarchical nature of the dominant relationship between the school and its surrounding community. The point stressed by Ms Ngoma-Maema is illustrative. In her description of how most academics in the school view engagement with communities, she observed that “When academics have money for HIV-AIDS projects, sponsored by either local or international organizations, targeted at a particular community, they will then engage with community. In the absence of such sponsorship, very few academics are willing to undertake such engagement. Also, academics engaged as professionals/experts rather than as citizens involved in a common project of societal changed”, through this the commodification of the functions of higher education.
This point highlights number of issues. Civic engagement by academics has been monetized – monetary value is attached. The role of academics is thus being narrowly conceived as that of bringing in the business. There is consequently no mutually benefiting and reciprocal engagements and relationships between the school and its surrounding communities – even its engagement with the government is by and large monetized – as it undertake consultancy works for various government ministries. There is another major problem facing the school and the university in general. In the school budget there is not provision for public or community works. Academics that intend to engage with community works have to do so from their own resources or rely on donor funding. Consequently the school is changing to what some might call “conventional academic setting” focusing on research and teaching which Dr. Mc Lennan described as the primary mission of the academy. But this research is conducted with the academics going to community to seek information for analysis rather than an engaged in mutual interactions and learning between the community and academics. While acknowledging that academics have a strong social role to perform, she argues that such role is based on individual choices. This reminds me of the experiences of some my colleagues at the Social Policy Program (SPP) at the University of Durban-Westville, who went to undertake research at the Cato Manor informal settlement in the Durban area. The community fearing that they are becoming guinea pigs by hords of researchers, whose research is not of immediate benefits to the community turned down their request for interviews and refused them access to the community. Thus even poor communities are more aware of the potential role higher education could play in fostering democratic development than academics, and the Cato Manor experience is an ample example.
While P&DM is located in Johannesburg, it is not of Johannesburg. This is one of the most unequal cities in the world, sharing the characteristics of the first world affluence and a fourth world characteristics of misery and poverty. Yet academics tend to avoid public engagements seeing their role as the production of knowledge and human resources required in a competitive global economic.
Academics, with few exceptions, adopt the detached role of interpreting events in the city. Various reasons are advanced for this – we are too busy, we can’t politicize academy. Ms Ngoma-Maema provided further insights into the erosion of public scholarship from the school, just as in the rest of the Wits University. According to her, “Community involvement is conceived as an individual choice rather than an institutional obligation”. Although community involvement is one of the four areas in which academics are evaluated, but little premium is placed on it. Ms Ngoma-Maema further observed that “if you do not have research publications or undertake your teaching, you will be asked why you did not do so. But if you did not have any engagement with community, nobody would bother to ask”. This is not peculiar to P&DM but to Wits University in general in its appraisal method and the consequent rewards that come with it until the recently established Vice-Chancellor’s award for academic citizenship. In the view of the university,
Academic citizenship refers to an individual’s cooperative involvement (as academic, professional and subject specialist) in the community of their faculty , the university, the wider national community, and the international community of scholars, in delivering a service , performing tasks and making contributions to the functioning, well-being, and upliftment of these communities. It includes those organizational citizenship activities conventionally classed as “administrative duties” as well as those related to ‘community service’ or “community participation’. Academic citizenship can be said to involve the design, teaching, in collaboration with relevant partners .
But the concept, as defined above, has not defined and shaped the works of academics in the university. At best, it remained marginal to the works of most academics. Thus, while the main campus of Wits is located in Braamfontein, a suburb in Johannesburg that has experienced rapid decay since the late 1980s and has a large concentration of nongovernmental organizations, Wits until recently when its embarked on the Braamfontein Regeneration Initiative, the Braamfontein-Wits-Newtown Cultural Precinct, the Community Higher Education Service Partnership, the Wits Volunteer Program, etc. has limited community engagement with both its immediate community and the civics (nongovernmental organizations) that are located therein . But even with these various initiatives, there is very limited interface and coordination between them. The university has recently set up the office of the Community University Partnership, the office is beset by number of problems that constrained its ability to function effectively. It is poorly resourced both in terms of personnel and finance. In 2000, Wits adopted a policy that by the end of the 2004 academic year, every student on campus would have had a service learning experience, but as the Head of the office of the Community University Partnership, Ms Heidi Loening-Voysey, lamented, this target is far from being achieved due in part to lack of commitment and mainstreaming of civic engagement in the University curriculum . The academic curriculum is geared towards narrow professionalism. MBA and other business-related degrees receive greater funding from the university than other departments – especially the humanities and social sciences. The emphasis is on career development rather than empowerment of students to become critical thinkers. Thus one of the consequences of market fundamentalism in academy today is to train students as potential employees and employers but not as citizens. Moja and Cloete (2001) have incorrectly identified this as the main function of education. In their words,
Higher education has two important functions in the knowledge economy. The one function is to produce medium-skills level professional graduates for the professions in the service sector; the other is to produce highly skilled knowledge producers for high-level innovation (p257).
This Human Resources approach to higher education, as I have noted earlier, has subordinated the democratic role of the University to the interest of the market and the fostering of a culture of economic individualism. Once again the words of Dewey aptly described the South African situation in particular and the African context in general. To Dewey, academics today tend to
…live as if economic forces determined the growth and decay on institutions and settled the fate of individuals. Liberty becomes a well-nigh obsolete term , we start, go, and stop at the signal of a vast industrial machine. Again, the actual system would seem to imply pretty definitely materialistic scheme of value. Worth is measured by the ability to hold one’s own or to get ahead in a competitive pecuniary race…it is not so much…functional urgencies of life that determine how favorable this physical necessity shall be, but extraneous money…earns. The philosophy appropriate to such situation is that of a struggle for the existence and the survival of the economically fit (Dewey, 1999:6)
With this come the transformation of academy and the changing forms of exclusion of majority of South Africans especially the poor. In this context the observation of the Preisdent of Namibia, Sam Nujoma is apropos in the South African situation. According to him, “Education in our country use to be enjoyed only by privileged few, whom apartheid and colonialism considered worthy of it. In other words, it was not the right of every citizen to have access to learning and its benefits ”.
As in Namibia, colonialism and apartheid were the dominant forms of exclusion and denial of access to education. Today, in the post-1994 period the market is the dominant form of exclusion, and by so doing reinforces racial inequalities and the none achievement of the goal of Education For All, one of the pillars in which the liberation struggle was anchored. The human resource approach to education, which though exclusionary and disempowering, has become the dominant paradigm even among progressive academics. And the emphasis is about students being conceived as “target market” and community and government as “clients”. Closely related with this development is a fostering of an individualistic culture and erosion of the sense of our collective humanity and citizenship. As Dewey rightly observed of America almost a century ago but applicable to South Africa in the 21st century is that economic individualism has become the source and justification of inequalities and oppressions, which manifest in racial, gender and class terms. It is therefore not only the practices of higher education in the post-1994 period that stripe academy of its public purpose but its discourse. It main products are individual apathy to politics and public affairs, -at best their political promote that of liberal democracy confining the role of citizens to voting in regular elections but not to participate in the formulation and implementation of socio-economic policies that will advanced their socio-economic welfare. In Dewey’s words, individualism is to much ingrained today that it serves to perpetuate the current disorganization in which financial and industrial power, corporately organized, deflects economic consequences away from the advantage of the many to serve the privilege few.
“The marketisation of higher education has penetrated the employment conditions and the campus relationships, resulting in a profound changes since the 1980s ‘unity in opposition’ to apartheid between workers, students and progressive academics. The individualization of academic workforce is at its highest in institutions which are the most involved in the globalizing” (Moja and Cloete, 2001: 262) .
Because science and technology are now a major mode of ideological mystification of power relations, critical theory must extend to the community of those who are its living embodiment. It must restore to scientists the actual relation between science and society and expose the deepening contradictions of the scientific ideology and the objective containment of science for the purpose of extending exploitation and domination throughout the world. Development of critical social theory within the scientific community can contribute to the creation of alternative programs for research and development. In this way, knowledge can be generated that relates to the needs of peoples who are trying to build social community, resist cultural manipulation, facilitate decentralization movements, and in general contribute to the actualisation of human needs that are otherwise ignored. By reorienting the scientific community, at least a significant sector of it, critical theory can become a material force for change by counteracting the current drift of science toward the formation and implementation of state policy [Schroyer, 1975, p.172].
Higher education has long been used as a way of nation building. Universities were not just educational institutions but also protected the national cultural heritage and provided the future leaders for national society and economy. Many .. universities nowadays offer education as a service that is not tied to specific locality or nation but become commodity for individual investment that can be purchased either in the country of residence, in other countries, or in the virtual world (Beerkens, 2003: 145) . `
This trend is not peculiar to Wits University or South Africa’s higher education but is spread throughout the academic community in Africa. Last year, I attended the 10th General Assembly of the Council for the Development of African Social Sciences (CODESRIA) in Kampala, Uganda. Most of the discussions, except with some few “die-hard” left-wing academics, were camouflaged under post-modernism. Academy in Africa, like elsewhere, is being striped of its common purposes and of politics. Thus one of the unfortunate development in African academy is its colonialization by the markets. African universities are being restructured to primarily meet the needs of a market economy. This restructuring is accompanied by appointment of Executive Deans and Heads of schools – appointed based on their management rather than academic credentials and experiences. One major implications of this development is that the internal democracy that has been the hallmark of the academic community is being eroded. Decisions are made in technocratic fashion rather than through collegial consultative processes.
4: Conclusion: Towards Public Scholarship in Africa
For academy to be relevant, it needs to reemphasize politics, class, and citizenship and must become relevant to the everyday existence of the people. It is time to bring the civic and public functions of academy back-in. Education’s public role is its primary role. It is more crucial now than ever at a time of ravaging HIV-AIDS, poverty, and squalor in the continent. Wits is likely on a path to re-discover its public mission, given the pronouncements of its newly appointed Vice Chancellor, Prof Loyiso Nongxa as part of his vision of what he refers to as the New Wits . He has committed the University to play an active role in the renewal of the African continent. To realize this new mission however, would require that the university commit resources to its civic function as well as changing the way academics are evaluated so that greater premium is placed on civic engagement or public scholarship in order to undertake its social function and become and engaged university. As Ms Loening-Voysey (2002) has correctly argued:
The purpose of working towards engagement as a university, rests in the advancement of citizenship, informed contributions to the solution of real problems, thereby contributing to the development of democracy, whilst addressing the development priorities of the country. The bedrock of any society and its advancement, be it technological, educational, social, political and economic, is embedded in that society’s intellectual resources. Universities form the foundation of this bedrock .
In conclusion, I argued that actions by academics to promote justice, improve the conditions of life of their fellow human beings and participation in the transformation of the world are all constitutive part of the social dimension of academy in Africa as elsewhere. Among others, this would mean that higher education institutions must be responsive to the needs of their immediate communities, neighborhoods, localities, nations and the continent at large. This requires more attention especially now that the continent is trying to overcome its history of deprivation and marginalization in order to improve the living conditions of majority of the African people. Again, the words of the great American philosopher, John Dewey is apropos for the African context in the 21st century. He notes that:
When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious (cited in Dworkin, 1959: 49).
As Penny Enslin writing on education in South Africa has correctly argued, the task facing progressives
is to counter the dominant discourse, challenging its presuppositions, restoring the political from its position as a forbidden speech, and overthrowing the divisive practice of depicting teacher as expert scientist who stand aloof from the problems of their immediate environment and society, and primarily serve the interest of a market economy (Enslin, 1990: 89) (emphasis added)
As I have argued elsewhere, the calls for bring politics back-in – A Different Kind of Politics. Among others, this means the need for higher education to serve
…the need for self-empowerment by individuals, communities, localities and countries so that citizens can claim their rights to develop themselves and society, and by so doing ‘roll back the gods of the market’ that have been so disempowering and exclusionary, as well as roll-back its pervasive values of individualisation, commodification and monetisation of life. This is particularly pertinent in the new South Africa in order to overcome the legacy of apartheid racial and gender inequalities and political exclusion bequeathed by apartheid. Therefore, rather than treat the people as clients and consumers, South Africans must first and foremost be treated as citizens for whom politics should primarily be aimed at enhancing their human welfare. This thus would move away from the politics of exclusion and elitism to the politics of active citizenship and popular participation .
In South Africa, like in other parts of the continent, the fundamental task that confronts academics is to make themselves and their works relevant to the everyday life of the African people.
I welcome an international discussion about these topics and signs that our colleagues in the United States are beginning to reach similar conclusions.
Omano Edigheji, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
