Is education making us worse at managing our affairs?

Asukuu fuo no asei bibiaa wo Ghana translated literally as ‘the educated elites have spoiled everything in Ghana’. 

This was what Samuel (actual name withheld) told me when I was plying the Tema Motorway with him in November 2023.

Samuel has less education and according to him, Ghana was better managed when there were less highly educated persons in the country.

He explained to me that leaders and even followers in the olden days were diligent with their work and took great care of the state’s properties.

He expressed his deep dissatisfaction with how state properties are currently mismanaged by persons with certificates from some of the top universities in the world.

He argued that the more we attend school, the more we mismanage the country and rob our fellow citizens with our pens.

Thinking

The conversation with Samuel got me thinking deeply over the past two months about the relationship between higher education and employment, leadership and the overall development of the country.

For instance, with less educated persons in 1957, Ghana was the wealthiest nation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) at the time with per capita income approximately equal to that of South Korea.

Today, with more educated elites, Ghana has lost its place as the wealthiest SSA country and is not even among the top five.

Again, South Korea’s per capita income is currently more than 10 times of Ghana’s.

The worrying trend of university graduates not finding jobs with lots of illiterates engaged in several income-generating activities undermines the potency of the nation’s education system in preparing students well for national development.

Who is to blame? The graduates themselves or the education system?

And what are we not doing right?

System

While no attempt is made to rubbish Ghana’s education system and undermine the inventions and innovations of some of its graduates, it does appear that the education system incapacitates the graduates and does not prepare them well to be meaningful contributors to the sustainable development of the country.

Worrying

It is also worrying to note that some job adverts in Ghana state that they prefer graduates from some prestigious universities alone, implying that graduates from the nation’s public universities are not good enough for the advertised roles.

Some companies even go to the extent of hiring persons with foreign education to occupy their roles and only engage Ghanaian graduates for less relevant roles.

The world is growing at a faster pace with artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, etc., as the orders of the day.

Efforts should be made by the relevant authorities and tertiary institutions to structure their courses to better prepare students for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

We cannot continue to let our education system breed unemployed graduates whose only solace will be to fly out for greener pastures in hostile countries.

The writer is the Founder/Executive Director,
Akurase Mpuntuo Foundation.

E-mail: pdadzie03@gmail.com