‘That we be free from fear’: Thoughts on education and Malawi at 54

On 6^th July 1964, fifty-four years ago, there were four secondary schools in Malawi, and not a single university. There was Blantyre Secondary School, Zomba Catholic Secondary School, Dedza Secondary School, and Mzuzu Government Secondary School. There were close to 360,000 primary school learners, and the country had between 3 and 4 million people. That year, 6,000 Malawians entered secondary school to start Form 1. The University of Malawi was opened exactly three months after independence, on 6^th October 1964. Its first intake was 180 students (other sources put the figure at 90).

Fifty-four years later, there are over 1,400 secondary schools in Malawi and just over 380,000 secondary school students. About 100,000 students enter Form 1 each year. There are four public universities with about 20,000 students. The University of Malawi alone has 13,000 students. There are more than 28 private universities, accommodating what can be estimated to be close to 20,000 students, although the real number could be less or more than this. A Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS) is expected by the end of this year, which should help with more accurate numbers.

The above numbers show what has changed on Malawi’s educational landscape since 1964. It looks impressive when compared to the numbers of fifty-four years ago, and puts to rest the argument that we rushed to become independent; that we should have allowed the colonialists to continue ruling over us so as to develop the country more rapidly. They ruled the country for seventy years, and the 1964 numbers represent what they achieved in that period. But compared to the potential that we have as a country, in terms of resources and talent, we could have done much more.

We have achieved gender parity in Standard 1 enrolment although we lose that parity starting from Standard 4. Selection to secondary school is also almost at par for boys and girls, although the pass rates both at Standard 8 and in Form 4 still favour boys. The MSCE results have been improving, especially in 2017. More boys and girls score 6 points at MSCE, which gives the impression that Form Four exams these days are not as hard as in the past.

My hypothesis is that kids today have wider access to general knowledge because of modern technology: smart phones, satellite TV, radio stations. Nutrition has also improved from several years ago, which has in turn improved academic performance. There are many more students sitting exams, a natural consequence of our population boom. When I sat my Form 4 exams in 1989, there were 13,000 of us. As I am writing, 209,000 are writing the 2018 MSCE. In statistical terms, the chances of more students scoring 6 points are far greater these years than they were in 1989.

We still have enormous challenges and are nowhere near where we should have been after 54 years. An incredible number of students who enter Standard 1 do not reach Standard 8. In 2017, just over 255,000 students sat the Standard 8 examination. When this class entered Standard 1 in 2009, they were just over 877,000, according to the 2013 EMIS (Educational Management Information System). Some 622,000 students did not make it to Standard 8, for one reason or another, usually to do with dropping out or repeating.

Of learners who enter Standard 1, only 16 percent go to secondary school, according to the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS) III. The total primary school enrolment currently stands at about 5 million, yet there are only 380,000 students in all of Malawi’s secondary schools. We have too many people out of the school system who should be in school.  A rough calculation of tertiary enrolment shows that there are not much more than 50,000 students in our colleges and universities. We have the lowest tertiary enrolment rate in the world, at 0.8 percent, as per the MGDS III.

We do not treat our teachers with the respect they deserve, especially primary school teachers. We have improved in paying them on time, but we are failing to pay some of them their leave grants. Each year many teachers are upgrading their qualifications but they are going for years without the government issuing them their well-deserved promotions.

When they upgrade, they leave primary schools and go to teach in secondary schools or teacher training colleges, because we do not have a structure for university-educated teachers in our primary school system. We deprive the primary school system of highly educated teachers, believing that primary school learners do not deserve well-educated teachers. This is a travesty.

We have finally began doing something about improving the education of primary school teachers from a two-year certificate toward a university diploma, and hopefully, eventually, toward a university degree. Minister of Education, Science and Technology, Hon. Bright Msaka, told parliament in March that consultations on this had started.

In fact, this has been on the agenda for the past ten years. It was provided for in the National Strategy for Teacher Education and Development 2008-2017, but not much happened in the ten years since that document became operational. The entry level requirements to go a teacher training college have been hiked to a minimum of four credits, a measure aimed at improving the quality of teachers.

Learners at January Primary School, Thyolo district

Infrastructure in rural schools, where the majority of Malawian children and youth are educated, remains in a state of disrepair. A few weeks ago the nation was shocked by the deaths of four learners at Nantchengwa Primary School in Zomba rural, crushed to death when a classroom block collapsed and fell on them. It had been constructed by the community in their desire to support their children’s education.

As has been the case for several years now, the education sector was given the biggest chunk of the national budget, at MK166 billion. In the 2017-2018 the education sector was given MK235 billion, which means that the 2018-2019 education budget is less than last year’s. This is surprising, considering that the 2018-2019 national budget has gone up from just over MK1 trillion to MK1.4 trillion (after a recent adjustment downward from MK1.5 trillion presented in parliament).

Youth unemployment has started dominating public discourse, a recognition of the dire straits many young Malawians are in. Because many youths do not have meaningful employment, they have become easy to manipulate and abuse for political purposes. With the 2019 elections approaching, it has been deeply disturbing to see youths being abused yet again, sent on political errands to terrorise journalists, civil society activists and others expressing their frank opinions about developments in the country.

Reports of people getting beaten up in the full presence of police, receiving death threats and having their rights to free expression and association violated are a throwback to the one-party dictatorship. It is as if the masses of unemployed youth are actually part of a deliberate plan to advance political interests.

There is a line in our national anthem that goes “join together our hearts as one, that we be free from fear…” One would think that in this day and era, we would have robust structures that promote debate and discussion over national matters in a free manner, devoid of fear and threats, but it would seem the closer 2019 approaches, the more steadily we are edging towards an abyss.

There is an urgent need to do something about the many Malawians who have been denied an opportunity for a decent education over the years. The Sustainable Development Goal for education stipulates free secondary school education, an idea that does not enthuse Malawians, owing to what happened last time we made primary education free. Today, primary education is free only on paper. In reality, parents and guardians of primary school children are paying for the education of their wards, only it’s not called school fees.

We have huge disparities between a few who can afford decent education in good private schools, and the many who go to poorly resourced public schools. We are a very unequal country, and that inequality distorts the discussion we need to have around providing quality education to everyone.

We need to seriously think of education as an investment that lays the foundation the country needs for development that is really meaningful for the majority. It is only when we can begin to address the inequality in our country, rooted in the disparities in educational opportunity, that we can begin to be truly free from fear.

Malawi at Fifty One: The Education Legacies of Malawi's Presidents Hitherto

It is a noteworthy paradox that while the seventy years Malawi was under colonial rule from 1894 to 1964 there was no university, within nine months of independence, Malawi had one (Cuthbert Kachale, 2015). In ensuring that Malawi got a university just months after independence, the founding president of the country, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda made clear the pioneering role that higher education was going to play in the development of the country.

However the advances our higher education system has accomplished have not been optimally used to improve the overall education system and classroom practices. I argue in the ensuing discussion, as we mark fifty one years of independence, that the failure to use the higher education system to improve the quality of teaching and the teaching profession has cost the country in development terms. 

When schooling is fun

The road to independence was tortuous and meandering. The first Malawians to become cabinet ministers were sworn in four years before independence. That year, 1961, Malawi’s population was 4 million people, according to the late Kanyama Chiume (1982), in his eponymous autobiography. In that year, the country had 30 university graduates, 7,100 Standard 8 candidates, and 500 secondary school spaces. As the first Minister of Education, Chiume knew that enrollment needed to rapidly increase at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of the education system. He devoted the short time he spent as Minister of Education to pursuing that goal.

The efforts paid off. As independence came and Malawi poised herself to enter the decade of the seventies, enrollment at the primary level was expanding exponentially. According to Harvey Sindima (2002), by 1970 Malawi’s primary school enrollment had shot to 333,102, while that of secondary schools has increased to 9,686. A total of 977 Malawians were attending the University of Malawi. For the next two decades, the numbers kept doubling, as did the national population.

By 1990 Malawi had 1,325,453 primary school students, 16,432 secondary school students, and 1,620 university students. Expansion at the primary level did not correspond with expansion at secondary and tertiary level, leading to the lowest higher education enrollment rates in the world fifty years later (Government of Malawi, 2014). But Kamuzu’s penchant for prestige was best personified in the magnificent Kamuzu Academy, founded in 1981. An elite secondary school, it has educated a significant number of Malawians providing leadership in the public and private sectors, and internationally.

During Kamuzu Banda's reign, civil servants, including teachers, were posted to any part of the country, according to need. It did not matter where one came from. In 1989, Kamuzu Banda announced at a political rally that some teachers teaching away from their districts of origin were not dedicating themselves fully. He decreed that with immediate effect, teachers who were teaching away from their home districts should relocate to their home districts.

Most districts in the country were affected by this decree, as some lost huge numbers of teachers. Some have argued that teachers from the northern region of Malawi were the most affected. Thousands of them had been teaching in the central and southern regions, and were forced to return to the northern region. But there were also schools in the northern region which lost teachers as well. Some believe that the quality of education was drastically affected by this decree. In the absence of a substantive, detailed analysis, the jury is still out as regards the merits and demerits of the decree.

In terms of keeping pace with the population and providing quality education to as many Malawians as possible, doubling enrolment rates over the decades was insufficient. There was need for much more rapid rates of increase. That was left to Dr. Bakili Muluzi, the man who succeeded Dr. Kamuzu Banda to become Malawi’s second president. Muluzi pledged universal primary education, which entailed removing school fees from primary education and making it free. It became his first major education reform as soon as he was sworn in as president in 1994. The number of primary school learners went up from the 1.9 million it had reached in 1993, to 3.2 million in 1994. The Muluzi government recruited 20,000 new teachers that same year to become student teachers, teaching during the school year, and undergoing training in college during the holidays.

It was during Muluzi’s presidency that teacher development centres (TDCs) were introduced, numbering 315 across the country. The school inspection system was transformed from district-based inspectors to zone-based advisers, also numbering 315 to match the number of TDCs. Regional education offices (REO) were turned into education division offices, led by Education Division Managers (EDMs). The number went from three regional offices to six divisional offices.

A very ambitious plan to expand access to secondary school education envisioned the construction of 250 community day secondary schools. This would have increased the primary to secondary school transition rate from the erstwhile 11 percent, to 70 percent, according to Roy Hauya (1996). The country was able to establish new community day secondary schools, but not numbering the promised 250. In higher education, Muluzi’s administration gave Malawi its second university. What was Mzuzu Teachers’ Training College was converted into Mzuzu University, and became operational in 1999.

By the time Muluzi left office and was succeeded by Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika in 2004, the education system had come to be characterised by failures resulting from the shock of UPE. Class sizes had ballooned into hundreds, particularly for lower primary, and teacher morale was very low. Teaching and learning materials became scarce, and physical structures were in a state of disrepair. Bingu wa Mutharika sought to stabilise the system by pledging to adequately fund the sector at all levels from primary to tertiary. In his first term, from 2004 to 2009, the system experienced relative stability.

Mutharika had big plans for higher education. Talk of a new university started in his first term, and in his second term construction of the Malawi University of Science and Technology started. The university had initially been intended for Lilongwe, the capital city, but Bingu decided to move it to his home district in Thyolo, on land he said he had donated for that purpose.  By the time Bingu died in April 2012, the university was still under construction. It would be completed and opened during the presidency of his successor, Dr. Joyce Banda, becoming Malawi's fourth public university.

During Bingu's presidency, Bunda College of Agriculture, a constituent college of the University of Malawi, became an independent university. That brought the number of public universities in the country to three. Private universities, which were almost non-existence during Kamuzu's time, began thriving during Bingu's presidency. The government also moved to start regulating the higher education system, and the National Council for Higher Education was formed, becoming operational during Joyce Banda's rule. 

The two years Joyce Banda was president of Malawi were not enough for her to leave large visible footprints on the system. However it was while she was president that the country witnessed an unprecedented emphasis on girls’ education, an idea she championed both in public and in private. Towards the end of her tenure the Ministry of Education, Science and technology launched the National Girls Education Strategy and the Girls’ Communication Strategy. It was a befitting moment for Joyce Banda’s efforts to highlight the importance of keeping girls’ in school and reversing the troubling trend of so many girls dropping out due to early marriages.

There was a visible attempt during Joyce Banda’s presidency to bring teachers’ welfare to the fore. This was seen by some as an attempt to placate teachers after Dr Banda had made remarks that teachers had construed as demeaning of them. On two occasions she had alluded to how cattle farmers made more than teachers, betraying a lurking contempt.

The effort to address issues of teachers’ welfare came toward the end of her presidency. Joyce Banda’s last Minister of Education, Dr. Lucious Kanyumba, toured the whole country and met teachers. He spoke about what the ministry was doing to end chronic problems of late salaries and low teacher morale. Teachers told him of their problems. Coming during the high campaign season, with weeks to go before the election, many teachers saw it as a campaign ploy.

When Professor Peter Mutharika took over from Dr. Joyce Banda in May 2014, he picked up from where he had stopped during his older brother’s presidency. As Minister of Education in the late Bingu wa Mutharika’s presidency, Peter Mutharika first introduced the idea of community colleges in 2010. As soon as he was sworn in, he set about accomplishing that task. Midway through 2015, some community colleges have already started operating. President Mutharika has already embarked upon a project to construct another new university, in Mzimba district.

However at the primary and secondary school levels, the problem of teacher morale, the most significant of the problems afflicting Malawi’s education system, is getting worse. Today, anger amongst Malawian teachers has become so pervasive it severely corrodes the education system. In the first of 2015, salary delays took a turn for the worse. Leave grants and rural hardship allowances went unpaid for several months and many teachers in many districts stopped teaching. With communication from the ministry not forthcoming, teachers resorted to asking fellow teachers on facebook groups for updates. It is frightening to imagine how these angry, bitter, frustrated and demoralised teachers are treating children under their care.

Despite the difficulties, there are many teachers who continue dedicating themselves. There are teachers who are unleashing their creative energies in their classrooms and schools, inspiring children. There are teachers who are so hungry for more education and professional development they are going out of their way to find opportunities. There are Malawian teachers using the power of the Internet to connect with other teachers in Malawi and around the world. Most of them remain unrecognised and unrewarded, but they continue, undaunted, aiming at a higher prize: national development.

Can Malawi afford to make teaching a high-prized, coveted profession?

The first fifty years of Malawi’s existence as an independent nation have had their highs and their lows. When few Malawians had access to education, the quality was commendable. When more Malawians were afforded the opportunity to go to school, quality plummeted. Quality and quantity need not be mutually exclusive. The starting point for improving quality while expanding access needs to be the quality and welfare of teachers. As we turn fifty one years old, this needs to be top of our educational agenda.

What we have learned from the best educational systems on the planet is that investment in teachers is the most important factor for national development. When the teaching profession is highly prized, prestigious, and rewarding, it can propel a country to greater heights. The creative possibilities from committed and motivated teachers are endless. They become a catalyst for development in many sectors. Malawi still awaits a president who will have a profound understanding of how an empowered and highly educated cadre of teachers, particularly at primary and secondary level, as well as at tertiary, can transform the nation. Will Professor Peter Mutharika be that president?

Note: A version of this article appeared in the April-May issue of The Business Journal (Malawi), published by The Student Media Group. I would like to thank Mike Chipalasa and Cuthbert Kachale for feedback that has resulted in updates to the article.

What happened to creative writing in Malawi?

The Nation newspaper has raised the alarm over the quality of creative writing in the country. Judges in several national writing competitions have pointed out the quality of entries is very poor it is clear something has happened to creative writing in Malawi.

In order to find a more satisfactory answer to the question as to what has happened to Malawian creative writing, it would be a good idea for the Malawi Writers Union (MAWU) to team up with an English Department in one of the prominent universities to do a study of this phenomenon. A starting point would be to survey a few hundred creative writers, young and old, and ask them about their reading and writing habits and contexts.

I must confess I don't read or write as much fiction as I used to. One reason is because there's a lot to read nowadays online. A lot of my writing nowadays is expository; feature articles and opinion pieces for my blog and for op-ed pages. And that's what drives my reading habits also. I read a lot of expository writing; essays, articles, and opinions. Some of it is also for work purposes in the form of reports.

If I can offer some informed guesses why creative writing is facing problems in Malawi, it could be due to the question of what young Malawian writers are reading these days. Reading is fundamental to writing and thinking. The quality of what is available for reading could be a big factor in what has happened to creative writing in Malawi. I can think of four factors to elaborate this point.

The late Chinua Achebe and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka:
Are young Malawian writers reading some of Africa's and the world's best writers?

The first factor could be the availability of well-written literature by writers from Malawi, from the Southern African region, and from the rest of the world. Let's face it, our bookshop industry collapsed. This happened due to neoliberal policies introduced soon after we adopted multiparty politics in the mid-1990s. The bulk of books one now finds in the few bookshops we have available are for study purposes; for people studying all kinds of programmes, the majority being business management and finance-related fields. There are Malawian bookshops that do not carry a single Malawian fiction book, new or old.

The second factor is the quality of teaching in secondary schools, colleges and universities. The roots of this problem lie in the general problems Malawi's public education system has been facing due to large classes, poor teaching and learning resources, low salaries, and low morale amongst teachers. Most school libraries have very few books outside the syllabus. Even some of our best secondary schools don't stock enough copies of books on the syllabus. One English teacher recently told me she has six copies of one literature title for a class of 60. What this means is that we have students who sit MSCE without having read a single literature book in its entirety.

Of the many private universities that are mushrooming across the country, very few offer humanities courses where people can study languages and literature, creative writing and literary criticism. The University of Malawi has been operating without a university bookshop for some eighteen years now. Funding problems in the universities mean that even the university libraries are unable to stock new literature.

The third factor is the abandonment of research in Malawian languages: The deliberate policy to exclude Malawian languages from official business in government and in public life, and in the economy means that local languages are not developing. They are stuck in the past. Creative writing benefits from language development, and the development of local languages influences writing and publishing in other languages.

A fourth factor is the poor incentives for good writing. Malawi does have very good writers in local languages and in English, but they have to put food on the table first. Writing does not pay well enough to allow these writers to spend time developing good fiction. So we have lots of young people populating the fiction pages in weekend papers and in competitions without the guidance of expert writers and good writing.

What can we do to improve the quality of creative writing in Malawi?

It is useful to point out that MAWU and other individuals are doing a commendable job encouraging students and organising competitions. But there is need to do more trainings and workshops alongside these competitions. There is a thriving creative culture amongst a few individuals in cities such as Lilongwe. The Living Room hosts open mic readings every Wednesday evening, although this is a niche for a small group of people. The launch of the Story Club by Shadreck Chikoti is an excellent initiative, and more such clubs appear to be on the rise. In 2012 Caine Prize finalist Stanley Onjezani Kenani launched Malawi Write, a website that publishes high quality Malawian writing.

There is a big need to incentivise creative writing. As weekend newspapers are the commonest medium for publishing fiction, newspaper publishers need to take a special interest in creative writing. They could invite particular, well-known writers to write good stories and pay them attractive amounts. The more Malawians are exposed to excellent creative writing the better the creative writing that Malawians will be producing. That was the idea behind the website Malawi Write. The newspapers can consider sponsoring established writers to hold workshops for young writers. They can also organise literary contests.

We must augment efforts to promote the teaching of language and literature in schools and universities. Schools need to emphasise the importance of language and literature in cultivating critical minds. Students should be encouraged to read more books beyond what's on the syllabus. Private universities need to include language and literature in their curricula, and to develop university libraries that stock good Malawian and world literature.
Publishers have always complained that Malawians don't buy books, and so literature is a loss-making venture for them. It's a chicken and egg situation. Publishers need to support schools and libraries in promoting reading and writing. The more Malawians become interested in reading and writing the more sales publishers will realise, thereby promoting reading and writing.

We should also work on government policy. We need government policies that can promote the availability of reasonably priced books in the bookshops. Tax on books and imported paper should be reduced so as to bring down the cost of books and newspapers. The absence of a prominent public university in the capital city deprives Lilongwe of an intellectual culture that can drive both the arts and the humanities, and science and technology. The government needs to make the construction of a big public university, or the expansion of existing public University of Malawi colleges in Lilongwe, as a priority in higher education.

What's the matter with Malawian universities?

When a university student performs poorly and is withdrawn, the problem is with the student. But when 132 students perform poorly and are withdrawn, then the problem is no longer with the student alone. The university itself has a problem. When it is two universities, then it is not just the universities that have a problem, it is the broader national educational system.

It is instructive to scrutinise the numbers. The number 132 comes from the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), out of a first year class of 700. Granted that a few were withdrawn from second and third years, but LUANAR authorities are on record to have said the majority are first year students. That figure, 132, is almost one fifth of the class; 19 per cent, to be precise. From Chancellor College the number withdrawn is said to be 116.

In the 2012-2013 academic year, the group speculated to have yielded the mass weeding, Chancellor College admitted 399 students. This is based on records uploaded on the University of Malawi’s website on 25^th September 2012. If these numbers are accurate, 116 out of 399 is 29 per cent. 

A few theories as to how such numbers could be withdrawn in one year have dominated commentary on social media, in newspaper columns, and on the street. The list includes: the results of cheating at MSCE; the quota system, poor preparation in secondary school, capacity problems in the universities in question, and students entering university too young, among others. Both LUANAR and Unima say they have investigated the causes of this massive performance failure, and will be releasing reports. So it is difficult at this point to pin down any single cause.

Will the new Malawi University of Science and Technology 
herald a new approach to higher education?

But some of the reasons thus floated are less likely to be causes of the problem. Cheating at MSCE is less likely a cause of the poor performance because selection into either Unima or LUANAR is not based on MSCE results only; students sit an entrance examination. Selection is based on an aggregate of both the MSCE and the entrance exam. If an exam is the problem, then it is both the university entrance exam and the MSCE.

The quota system is also an unlikely single cause. The majority of students entering Unima and LUANAR these days are coming from elite schools and well-to-do families. Joseph Patel, president of the Independent Schools Association of Malawi (ISAMA) says private schools contribute 80 per cent of students entering Malawian universities every year.

Researchers Stella Kaabwe and Lillian Kamtengeni estimate that 91 per cent of university students in Malawi come from wealthy families. Poor families send less than one per cent. The remaining eight per cent are from somewhere in the middle. The double bar system of two exams means that whoever ends up getting selected has merited their place.

Most of these students will have gone to very good secondary schools. If you are in doubt, next time the university selections are announced just look at the full-page congratulatory advertisements from elite schools listing their students who have been selected. And many of these students will have received specialised university entrance exams coaching. For most students, you have to come from a well-to-do family background to afford an expensive private school, and the exams coaching. 

If cheating at MSCE and the quota system are not plausible explanations, the other suggested causes have a higher likelihood: poor preparation in secondary school, capacity problems in the universities, and students entering university too young. Let’s briefly examine each in turn. Poor preparation in secondary school sounds counter-intuitive, considering that many of the students are said to be coming from elite secondary schools. One lecturer, quoted in a Nyasatimes article, said many students struggle with English, while some students speak perfect English but have very poor writing skills.

This raises the question of what the MSCE and University Entrance Exam measure. Do they measure what a student knows? Or do they measure a student’s reasoning capability and aptitude? Or both? Is it possible for one to be coached perfectly and pass the entrance exam when their aptitude cannot withstand the rigours of higher level reasoning?

Many students these days are learning to speak perfect English without grasping the fundamentals of reading, writing and reasoning in that language, let alone in their mother tongue. The reason for this, as argued by language education researchers, is that learners learn best using a language they are familiar with. Learning in a familiar language facilitates not just learning but reasoning, writing and problem solving.

Our problem in Malawi is not that we are introducing English too early, no. It is that we are abandoning the familiar language too early, before children have developed important faculties such as reasoning, arguing, writing, problem solving and discovering. The best education systems in the world teach their children using a language they are familiar with, and then add a second language such as English for non-English speaking societies.

What Malawian private schools are doing, abandoning local languages very early in a child’s development stages, is going to affect intellectual aptitude in later academic life. The stipulation in the new Education Act to make English the language of instruction from Standard 1 is a big mistake. It has no basis in language education research. It is Malawian children who will pay the price for this mistake in later life. The solution would have been to introduce a multi-lingual policy, with a deliberate provision to strengthen local languages. This needs resources, but it is a worthy national investment decades down the line.

At the secondary level, our secondary schools are going through a troubled period, an extension of poor preparation in early childhood and primary school. Secondary school teachers in government schools report large, overcrowded classrooms. There are very few books such that in some cases ten students have to share one copy. Reading is the foundation for intellectual development. We have students who finish Form Four without finishing a single prescribed literature book.

Another explanation offered thus far has been capacity problems in the university. As Dr. Boniface Dulani of Chancellor College told me in a private conversation, accommodation problems in the universities and in surrounding areas mean that some students reside in conditions that make it difficult for them to concentrate on their education. Some are residing in houses with no electricity or running water, far from campus. Dr. Dulani also bemoans the unpreparedness of those that come too young. At 14 or 15, one is too young for the university, unless one is a certified genius. There are geniuses and child prodigies alright, but it cannot be everyone.

Some classes are very large and are a burden for the lecturers, as Dr. Dulani indicates. Without a system of Teaching Assistants or Graduate Instructors as is the case in US universities, students have no opportunity for extra help. The culture of consultancies also means that attention to individual students has to compete with attention to a lecturer’s other responsibilities and needs.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology is quoted as having received reports from the universities on what has happened for such large numbers of students to have performed so miserably. There are a number of questions one hopes the reports have provided answers to: What are the percentages of students withdrawn from particular years? What is the ratio of male to female students withdrawn? What is the proportion of those on the parallel system to those on residential? What disciplines have been most affected?

We will also need to know what support services are available to students, from their lecturers and from their respective administrations. How many of these students came from private schools? How many from government schools? How about community day secondary schools? How many received coaching for the entrance examinations?

Only a holistic analysis can provide answers to these and other questions. This is more than about the students alone. It is about the entire education system and its recent history.


Note: A shorter version of this article was published in The Malawi News of 14th December 2013 under a different title.

Getting MUST right: New university, new opportunity

The pleas from government-sponsored students in Malawi’s public universities for a raise in their monthly allowances seem to be just what this country needed to begin a conversation on how to overhaul the way we fund public universities. The opening of MUST later this year, as announced by Hon. Eunice Kazembe in June, gives the country a chance to recreate the blueprint for how to provide university education.

Government-sponsored students in Malawi’s public universities are not only afforded a free university education, they are “lucratively employed” to pursue a university education, as somebody put it on my facebook wall some weeks ago.  As Minister of Education Hon. Eunice Kazembe explained on MBCTV recently, each government-sponsored student receives up to K400,000 per year in allowances. It is one thing to go to university for free, it is a different thing to be paid in the process.

If MUST will be run in the same business as usual terms as the other universities, then it too risks going through the same disruptions that have come to characterise the already-existing universities. Indications are that a major rethink is underway, going by what Hon. Kazembe and Dr. Emmanuel Fabiano, Vice Chancellor of the University of Malawi, have recently pronounced. Three things stand out as in dire need of a rethink as Malawi prepares to open its fourth public university. These are the much-debated quota system, student allowances, and loans.

Malawi University of Science and Technology. Photo courtesy : Nyasatimes

The reason why the quota system is the most controversial idea in Malawian higher education debates is because of the capacity problems in our universities. We are not moving quickly enough to address this problem. In 2011 a survey of 150 countries repeated what many of us already know, that only 0.3 percent of young Malawians in the 17-22 year age range are actually in university, placing Malawi last on the list. It is not difficult to understand where the low percentage is coming from.

The most recent intake into the University of Malawi, for the 2012/2013 academic year, was 908. The university administered the university entrance exam to 8507 candidates, out of which 6373 candidates passed. The Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) based its 2012/2013 selection on the same University of Malawi entrance exam, and admitted 456 students. The intake for Mzuzu University was 637 students, which includes upgrading students. The total comes to 2,001 students entering into the three existing public universities for the 2012/2013 academic year. The intake for private universities combined is much lower.

TEVETA’s last intake into technical colleges was 1,580, and teacher training colleges take in about 4,000 students annually. Even when we combine nurses’ colleges and other private colleges, the number of college-age Malawians actually in tertiary institutions is still less than 10,000.

The number of students who sat the 2012 Malawi School Certificate Examination was 111, 781. Out of these, 57, 906 passed. This year the universities will invite about 8,500 of these to sit the next entrance exam, but we should not let that number distort the real figure of Malawians who qualify for university education every year. Everyone who passes the MSCE exam demonstrates an intellectual capacity for higher education. That number stood at 57,906 last year.

If MUST is going to avoid the quota quagmire, admission will have to be based on what Limbani Nsapato calls a “win-win university quota selection system.” By this Nsapato means a system that is based on both merit and socio-economic factors that include gender, disability and poverty. This would give students from rural districts of Malawi and from marginalized backgrounds an equal chance of being selected. Currently, these groups stand little chance.

The second thing MUST must get right is the student allowances. The solution is to start by admitting as many students as the university has space for. Students will be asked to pay the full tuition fees. Hon. Kazembe told the nation last week that more than 60% of entering students in our public universities come from wealthy families and can afford the full tuition fees. Those able to pay will pay. Those unable to will apply for the available scholarships, providing incontrovertible evidence of their inability to afford the fees. Scholarships can include the much-debated allowances, commensurate with cost of living, for the students who demonstrate the need. But everyone else will be admitted on the full knowledge and expectation that they will bear the cost. Currently, the practice is to admit only those for whom the government has reserved a scholarship, many of whom are capable of paying the full fees.

The third thing will be the provision of loans, which will allow those in between to also pursue their education. But a crucial part of getting the loan system right will be loan repayment by alumni. It remains a mystery why we as a nation have failed to put in place a loan system that would have by now helped our universities expand and admit many more students than is the case now (as I argue in an earlier article, loans must be approached with great care. In the US, where student loans are widely available, they have become a burden on graduates, and threaten the country's economic stability).

MUST offers us a new opportunity for a fresh start.

Note: This article appeared on the 'My Turn' oped page of The Nation, Friday 21st June, 2013, under the title 'Getting Must Right From the Onset'.