Harnessing the economic power of science and technology

By XN Iraki

The recent announcement by the Minister of Higher Education that future funding of university courses will favour science and technology is likely to shake up higher education in Kenya.

Should this worry us or should we celebrate? Does our economic future lie in science and technology? Let us first give credit where it is due. The minister’s move is bold and likely to be resisted; some lecturers have already voiced their concern.

Such resistance was witnessed at Harvard University when its former president Lawrence Summers tried to "shake up" the university. Needless to say, most of lecturers are in humanities and paid the same salaries as scientists and other "hard thinkers."

They will protect their tuft.

However, the minister is right. The Government should correct "market imperfections."

Few can doubt that enrollment in humanities is higher than in science and technology in both private and public universities.

Curiously, lack of jobs has not been a good enough incentive to correct the enrolment. It is instructive to note that this loop sided enrolment in favour of humanities applies to Kenyans studying abroad too.

Education regulation

Educational suppliers, the owners of schools and colleges can never tell the consumers, the students that their courses will not get them any job.

The consumers often discover this too late after going through school. It is no wonder Kenya has too many career students.

To protect such vulnerable members of the society, the Government should regulate the education system. I suspect education policymakers have always known about this asymmetry in enrollment, but have never been that bold.

Could the minister’s science background be source of his boldness? That science and technology are not part of our national psyche is not debatable. Winners in school drama festival perform at State House, but not winners in science congress. Our media rarely focus on science and technology. Their shows have made our children believe the future lies in showbiz.

The number of high school kids whose ambition is to be musicians and actors is annoyingly high. Our Scientists are rarely glorified, and we rarely make use of their cause and effect thinking.

While Americans had them in their constitution writing team, we never included them in our CoE. Some argue that scientists and their technology counterparts are not "noisy" and are therefore, left out in political contests.

They find politicking too amorphous. Rarely do we nominate them as MPs or to other public jobs. We need affirmative action based on science/humanities instead of gender.

Our image of a scientist or engineer is a "boring" guy with some women claiming they cannot marry such characters even if moneyed. This is largely a stereotype.

What the minister is doing should have been done long ago. We all react to incentives and funding will shift the balance of enrolment and economic power to science and technology.

This will not stop some universities from offering a Bachelor of Science in Archaeology, a subject that fascinates me. Why do we study about early man from Zinjanthropus to Austropethecines when we do not know enough about the living man?

Spirit of new constitution

The minister will come against a deeply entrenched tradition. But should we not reshape our education and its contents in the spirit of the new Constitution?

Without such a move, our institutions shall not voluntarily change. After all, there are enough students in humanities courtesy of our high population growth and our students’ failure to do research on job trends.

The Government and private sector have also let our kids down. There are few comprehensive reports, which will be the hottest jobs in the next 20 years as we try to attain Vision 2030.

See for example data on ‘tomorrow’s jobs’ from the US bureau of labour statistics website.

Most students rely on peers in making decisions on careers, surprisingly even at graduate level. We seem to love herd mentality.

The importance of shifting to science and technology is so obvious to even non-scientists that we should not wait for such a directive from a minister.

Unfortunately, most see science and technology through gadgets. We love the fastest car, the phone with most features, the plasma TV, and all other technologies, but rarely do we appreciate the thinking that went into such gadgets.

Making a difference

Why else do we love pirating software? Yet science and technology should be seen as a culture, a way of life, where we ceaselessly harness science and technology to make our life easier. We love enjoying the fruits of science and technology, but not generating them.

Will the minister’s bold move make a difference? In the long run it will. We are likely to get a critical mass of population who appreciate science.

Such a mass will change our way of thinking, away from rent seeking to solving practical problems, away from blaming each other and our past to taking responsibility for our actions.

That is how a nation progresses, by confronting its problems head on. But more importantly is that science and technology are likely to create more jobs and enterprises than humanities. You are more likely to get a start up from science and technology campus than humanity campuses.

Think of Silicon Valley (and Caltech), MIT or India Institute of Technology. India, USA, Japan or even Taiwan have reaped from science and technology which even changed their brand.

We know Google, Tata, Sony and other science-based firms, but very little about the other aspects about these countries.

We rarely hear of the Amish in the USA or the Indian reservations such as Choctaw, where bead work rivals Masai’s. Curiously, no one has seen the need to teach Hindi, the dominant language in India here in Kenya!

China has leaped economically because of her emphasis on science and technology.

Where do we go from here?

In line with the much taunted political rebirth through the new Constitution, our education must go through a rebirth by shifting to science and technology.

The incentives being offered by the ministry of higher education through funding should hopefully make more students see the leverage science and technology offers to themselves and the economy in terms of jobs and entrepreneurship opportunities.

research and developments

Name any large firm in the world and chances are it is science or technology based. IBM has more employees than all Kenyan teachers from primary to university!

By shifting to science and technology, we are likely to lay a firm foundation for Vision 2030.The minister should extend the funding incentives to research and development (R&D), we need Nobel prizes in sciences.

After all, no country was built by words, but by work and hard thinking espoused by science and technology. Even proponents of humanities appreciate the power of science and technology by calling themselves "social sciences". This does not mean we shall not need humanities; they inspire us, and give us a framework for understanding ourselves, our relationships with the rest of humanity and our final fate after our sojourn on this small planet.

The minister seems to be saying loudly that all courses are equal, but some are more equal than others, a fact borne by history and economic reality

—The writer is a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, School of Business. xniraki@aol.com