Bad politics and the paradox of university rankings

Zimbabwe’s higher education sector finds itself caught in a paradox: the country has one of the highest literacy rates in Africa at 92%, but its universities perform dismally in both continental and international rankings. Pressure is mounting on the post-Robert Mugabe government to intervene.

In an editorial published on 21 May titled “Bring back the glory in Zim's universities”, regional newspaper the Southern Times, said it was high time the authorities worked to ensure the country’s institutions of higher learning regained their lost glory.

“Something is certainly not right and the sooner the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education moves in to address this, the better,” the editorial said.

The newspaper said it was a “shame” that the University of Zimbabwe could be ranked lower than universities in countries such as Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and even Sudan – more so given the fact that the country is still said to have the highest literacy rates on the continent.

The University of Zimbabwe, the country’s flagship university founded in the 1960s, has long lost its spot among the elite league of African universities. According to the 2018 list compiled by Australia-based university ranking organisation uniRank, the university is ranked number 59 out of 200 universities in Africa, with Zimbabwe’s Midlands State University following at 148.

Eight South African universities dominate the top 10 with the University of Pretoria occupying the top spot, followed by the University of Cape Town. The University of Nairobi in Kenya and the American University in Cairo, Egypt take ninth and 10th positions respectively. No Zimbabwean university is in the top 50.

Growth in student numbers

Last year, University of Zimbabwe Vice-chancellor Professor Levi Nyagura announced that the institution had set its sights on becoming one of the top 10 universities on the African continent by the year 2020, stressing that student enrolment at the learning institution had grown by more than 700%, from 2,280 in 1980 to 17,000 in 2017.

Such phenomenal student growth roughly coincides with the presidency of Robert Mugabe, who resigned last November. Mugabe was arguably – and ironically – the world’s most educated leader, having read for seven degrees and received over 10 honorary degrees from Africa, Asia, former Eastern Europe, Europe and America. Despite these qualifications, he oversaw a marked decline in quality at higher education institutions.

Dr Ricky Mukonza from Zimbabwe, who is now a senior lecturer at South Africa’s Tshwane University of Technology, said the quality of services in institutions of higher learning, as in all sectors in Zimbabwe, has been declining since Mugabe increasingly resorted to authoritarian measures in 2000 as a means to retain power.

Targeted sanctions by Western countries together with government’s policy failures meant that Zimbabwe fell into an economic crisis that affected all sectors including universities.

“The reasons [for the universities’ decline] are linked to the economic crisis that has bedevilled the country since the early 2000s. Most of the public universities suffer from inadequate resources to allow them to compete on the global stage. In some cases, good academics have left institutions for the diaspora,” said Mukonza.

Brain drain

In a report in 2010 highlighting the effects of ‘brain drain’ on the country’s institutions of higher learning, a parliamentary education report said universities countrywide were suffering from a severe shortage of both academic and non-academic staff and science departments were most severely hit.

Providing examples that it said mirrored the precarious situation in all state-run higher education institutions, the report said that at the University of Zimbabwe, the departments of animal science, community medicine, metallurgy and clinical pharmacology required 20, 18, 13 and 11 lecturers respectively to fill empty posts. Computer science and veterinary sciences both required 13 lecturers but had only one each.

Psychiatry, geo-informatics and mining engineering also had one lecturer each but required 16, 10 and eight respectively. The department of medicine had eight lecturers but needed 26, while the anaesthetics, statistics, anatomy and haematology departments each had two lecturers instead of 16, 11, 10 and eight respectively.

The parliamentary report said academics were in short supply, university infrastructure including lecture theatres, halls of residence and dining halls were dilapidated and the university fleet was grounded.

A year before the release of the parliamentary report, in his New Year message to students, then president of the Zimbabwe National Students Union Clever Bere said virtually no learning had taken place in 2008 when inflation reached world record levels because of a myriad of problems that included governance issues, industrial action by lecturers and the effects of the brain drain.

Although there have been efforts to stem brain drain in recent times, the effects of the dark days under Mugabe are still being felt.

Political meddling

Makomborero Haruzivishe, a former Zimbabwe National Students Union leader, told University World News that the higher education sector, like all other sectors, had been plagued by political manipulation and corruption under Mugabe and his government dating back to 1992 with the resignation of Professor Walter Kamba from the post of University of Zimbabwe vice-chancellor, citing “too many political fingers meddling in academic processes”.

“This was the beginning of the campaign by the Robert Mugabe dictatorship to silence student activism which was on the rise as a powerful force known as the 'vanguard of democracy'. The one-party state bid had been successfully resisted by students alone in an era when Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF were at their peak in terms of political control. This alarmed the dictatorship,” he said.

Haruzivishe said this resulted in desperate measures to more fully politicise all universities’ systems and college programmes through a system of propaganda designed to quash divergent views opposing the establishment.

Haruzivishe said access to education was tightly controlled and academic freedoms that were the basis of academic innovation were denied through repressive ordinances that ended up sabotaging the quality of education.

“So, the high literacy rate is justified by un-politicised education systems from primary up to high school levels. The poor university rankings, however, are explained by the politicisation of colleges which begins with the political appointment of vice-chancellors whose competence is based on repressing innovation,” he said.

Re-organisation

Gideon Chitanga, researcher and Africa analyst at Political Economy Southern Africa, a think tank focused on the Southern African Development Community, said there was a lack of funding for research and the collapse of organised research within many universities in Zimbabwe. Many academics working in universities in Zimbabwe are PhD students, he said.

Chitanga said the political crisis had drastically affected salaries for academics, funding for internet services and access to quality journals. He said many senior academics fled the political and economic crisis, joining institutions of higher learning abroad and especially in South Africa.

“There is a need to re-organise and modernise the higher education system, looking at better ways of funding research in an arrangement which brings together government, the private sector and international donors, the majority of whom withdrew support from these institutions due to sanctions imposed by the West at the height of the Zimbabwe crisis,” he said.