Last week I discussed the need for a re-thinking and overhauling of the Ugandan education system.
One of the debates over the last decade or two has been how or if to find the balance between the teaching of arts and sciences in our schools.
The argument by many, led by President Museveni, is that the arts are not “practical” and do not help much in growing the economy, while sciences are more concrete and so deserve government attention.
First of all, that is not factually true. For every Microsoft, there is a Warner Bros. film studio, for every Volvo in Sweden, there is the music group ABBA, for every Tata vehicle manufacturing in India, there is the Indian film industry.
In well-developed economies, every area of human endeavour and skill is equally developed. Giant ship-building companies exist side by side with children’s television cartoon production companies, car manufacturers are listed on the US or European stock exchanges along with book publishers.
Even in Uganda, we see today the growth in the “arts”, particularly the local music industry. The Ugandan music industry has evolved over the last 20 years on its own, without any help from the government, until today its stars are not only nationally famous but many of them actually earn real money from their music sales, concert appearances, corporate endorsements and performing at various weddings and social events.
Past perception
Students at the Makerere University Music, Dance and Drama department used to be the butt of jokes in the 1970s and 1980s, but today a major musician earns more than many prominent lawyers and doctors.
Because of the disruptive, rapidly-changing technological landscape, we are having to learn and adapt regularly without precedent to guide us.
This means we shall have to return to the basics. One of these is that today’s young people are poor at writing formally. There has been such a drop in writing skills over the last 10 years, thanks in part to the general drop in Uganda’s education standards but also speeded on by the informal writing style common on the Internet.
The basics of the earlier generations before mobile phones and email, such as commas, full stops (periods), semi-colons, sentences beginning with Upper cases and other forms of punctuation are a dying skill.
But there is still no substitute for clear, accurate, formal writing in journalism, medical reports, banking, insurance, legal, official government, corporate documents and academic documents.
So contrary to President Museveni’s urging for the arts to be abandoned in favour of the sciences, the crisis and the need is actually more in the arts than the sciences.
Uganda’s claim to putting its focus on the sciences over the arts is like holding a debate over whether Uganda should turn itself into a car-manufacturing country or an agricultural-producing country.
These debates about “comparative advantage” in world trade President Museveni encountered in his A-Level Economics class at Ntare School. He should know better than to dismiss the arts.
Uganda lacks the infrastructure across the country to cultivate science. Most schools and universities lack fully-equipped laboratories, of course most government hospitals are short of drugs.
Uganda does not have a sufficient electricity supply and even where it is, as was witnessed during last week’s Guinea-Uganda football match, is not always reliable.
Already, because of the high cost of transport and electricity, Ugandan products like toothpaste, processed fruit juice and others find it difficult to compete against Kenyan products.
At what cost will Uganda teach its sciences and later attempt to manufacture technological and industrial goods?
Which manufactured Ugandan goods today can compete with those produced at much lower cost from China?
Pretending that Uganda, with its loose standards and very low personal discipline, can as yet produce a scientific and technological economy is leaving the country to drift about in no man’s land: it will have neglected the arts which are easier to teach, and yet will fail to teach or implement the sciences well.
In my opinion, in fact, the opposite should become our national focus. Uganda and other poor and weak African countries, with less than 15 per cent of their populations on the national electricity grid, should stop imagining they can run scientific institutions and technological infrastructure.
Way forward
They should concentrate on the easier route to jobs and incomes, which is the performing arts. Zaïre (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) made a name for itself across Africa through its Rumba and Soukous music. Mali and Senegal in West Africa are doing the same, recently joined by Nigeria.
The Nigerian film industry is a major national force and popular across Africa. Burkina Faso holds a regular international film festival in Ouagadougou.
The undocumented history of most of Africa, except for White South Africa, remains a major issue to this day.
Many of our young people must be co-opted into a national effort to document this history and earn money from the joint effort. We still have a serious shortage of researchers, good photographers, writers, reporters and page designers in the news media.