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Gibson Nyikadzino
Zimpapers Politics Hub

The University of Zimbabwe last week weaned over 6 000 ready-for-the-job-market graduates, comprising the first batch of those who had enrolled under the Education 5.0 curriculum.

The essence of Education 5.0 is to ensure that educational institutions remove structures of coloniality and promote the “think-local, but solve-global” idea in national development. This means, through the transformative power of education, graduates are expected to come up with ideas that minimise the challenges involving rising levels of economic inequality, ignorance and cultural dominance among others.

Education 5.0 is a telling transition that Zimbabwe’s education quality is improving.

Such an education is an essential pillar against coloniality and equipping the African mind with power to create, innovate and address challenges in the obtaining social milieu.

However, the contemporary world labour market is, with cruelty, now a continuum that is replicating the unequal and unfair practices that are ardently haunting global South countries.

It is against this background that the over 6 000 graduates from the UZ be initiated to become industrial workmen to serve the nation.

It should be understood that like in colonial times when the settler establishments exploited mineral wealth and other natural resources in the colonised territories, they are still exploiting the young and educated populations from the developing nations.

This is now being done through “diplomatic and bilateral agreements”.

Evidence to this development is still fresh. For instance, last week Kenya signed a bilateral agreement with Germany that will see the former commit to provide 250 000 skilled and semi-skilled labourers to the European country as part of a labour migration deal.

In February, Malawi’s parliament permitted its government to proceed with its programme to send 10 000 labourers to work on farms and industries in Israel.

Sadly, in the past, the exploitation of Africans was instrumentalised through force and colonial legislation, while today, in politically independent countries, the exploitation of the native is being done consciously and voluntarily.

At the centre of this exploitation is the phenomenon of globalisation, which on its own is the extension of coloniality and the exuding of a complex system that exploits others in the name of global interconnectedness and networking.

In this matrix, one fact that is being overlooked is that Western countries, often referred to as the core or development metropoles, are now facing a shortage of workforce across all key economic sectors.

This shortage is also being compounded by the reality that these countries are facing higher rates of aging populations while younger populations are not engaging in the natural order of reproduction, leading to lower birth.

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Given that for a long time they have been on the apex of development, their social structure, registered economic prosperity and urbanisation have also influenced lower fertility rates due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence.

For these economies, it has then become expensive to run industrial economic activity on the basis of an aged populace and a young population that is not keen on active reproduction.

Investing in key sectors like engineering, medicine and health has become even more expensive. In this way, the West is now looking forward to hiring young African graduates and skilled labourers from the developing world all in the name of globalisation.

Conversely, the typical African labourer going to the West, in most cases, only falls into the low end of the European skill distribution, which is associated with low employment rates like being a truck driver, general hand, or security officer, despite having higher academic competencies.

This labour flight poses a great danger of brain drain from African nations that may impede their economic progress.

So, under the pretext of globalisation, skilled and semi-skilled personnel comprising active populations from developing nations, often referred to as the periphery, find themselves in search of “new opportunities” in the metropoles of development. It is these least developed countries that are exploited by the core countries for their cheap labour, raw materials and even agricultural production.

It is prudent to say the contemporary nature of the world and its operational system only seeks to serve the interests of European capitalism.

It is this system that is producing and reproducing a world-economy based on an extremely unequal division of labour between Global North and Global South nations.

For Zimbabwe, elements that advance Education 5.0 should be protected to ensure that the academic gains made so are translated into developing the national economy across all sectors.

By availing opportunities for the graduates and incentivising them, it helps Zimbabwe’s educational system products to become more integrated and dependent on each another. Globalisation has affected education from a theoretical standpoint, the practical idea should be used to address and get solutions to the national pitfalls bedevilling Zimbabwe.

The decolonisation of the education sector in Zimbabwe should remain a rigorous and ongoing process of critical engagement that should not be seen to perpetuate the notion that locals are only appreciated outside Zimbabwe’s job market.

Zimbabwe, through Education 5.0, is triggering honest conversations that colonised education, which is illustrated by the state of education across many African states, only results to epistemic violence and injustice, hence becoming flawed ethically and pedagogically.

Epistemic dissidence against the neo-liberal and globalisation is also good for developmental competition.

Zimbabwe and Africans in general should also have adequate knowledge of the continent to counter the inherited colonial systems that were not designed to enable them acquire such knowledge.

In 2004 American sociologist and economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein recalled what he said in the 1950s: “I had a gut feeling in the 1950s that the most important thing happening in the 20th century was the struggle to overcome the control by the West of the rest of the world.”

The first revolution should be about the mind, which is evident in Education 5.0.