This Kofi Ghana guy has actually opened a Pandora's box!

While I do not for even a flinch think that acquiring a Dutch passport at this juncture in my life is a better thing than a PhD, I think that it is individual-specific, depending on one’s circumstances in life at a particular point in time. I will admit that, some fifteen years ago, in my life’s journey, a Dutch passport would have won the economic argument!

Then the other part of the argument is that the guy is more concerned about excavating to our doorsteps the puzzle of the average Ghanaian’s reality! It is not, in my opinion, a mockery of the Ghanaian academia but rather to elicit the cantankerous, wicked, and malicious ways our leadership has failed particularly the youth, and has left the future of this country in flippant decay.

I think that I will particularly be interested in focusing on this other part of the argument. Come to think of it. Every government that comes into office says that they are ready to tackle youth unemployment. Education has become a golden key to achieving that. Meanwhile, nothing futuristic; nothing concrete has yet been done in this area. Is it planting for jobs or Zoomlion whatever or legalization of okada? These promises alone should tell you the state of despondency of the Ghanaian youth.

Interestingly, the fundamental issue that has to deal with the core of what kind of education we are providing the youth, and how market-ready that type of education can be absorbed by industry to create opportunities for the youth has been a missing part of the puzzle!

One argument against Nkrumah’s industrialization drive in the early 1960s was that he ended up creating industries that were undermanned and also lacked both raw materials and human capital. Here, it seems we are having a situation similar in scope whereby graduates are coming out of our school system, and on one hand, they do have not the skills-set that today’s industries require, and, on the other hand, there is just not enough industries to employ them.

The question is, must we build more industries to absorb a large chunk of graduates who do not have the requisite skills-set to man such industries or attend to the desired curricula of our school system first and make it more responsive to the needs of today’s industry? I believe that the latter should be the better way to go.

First of all, the government must understand that building a school system that will solve youth unemployment requires deep and constant engagement and collaboration with industry. Government must, therefore, allow industry to determine to a far larger extent, independently, the content and structure of our education system. The government cannot and must not be the one to lead an employment onslaught for the youth in this modern day. If the government allows a restructuring where industry leads, the private sector should be in that stead.

Unfortunately, there is a huge abyss yet to be filled in this regard. Graduates come out of an education system that gives them no practical orientation at all. It is not limited to the so-called hard sciences alone. Even in the arts and humanities, it is still the same approach. Stuff that students commit to memory are so remotely distant and abstract from today’s realities. The gap has more to do with modernity and the ability to adopt and adapt to the best practices in the world!

Come to think of it. In one of my typical American law classes, I remember some of my professors kept stressing at this point, that at the end of the day, no one is going to remember how many legalese you commit to memory or how long a diatribe you skillfully can build up in attack of your opponent in your advocacy class, but how many cases you have won!

Simply put, it is the practical aspect of it all that matters, not the speaking of big and irrelevant legal jargon and the colonial practice of writing judicial opinions in a flowering language! The focus has been on how to succeed as a practicing lawyer at the end of it all, and if you dare go into academia that is another path with a different focus. To achieve that, the training gives you so many hands-on, preps in terms of landmark cases, moot courts, clinics, and externships to choose from.

The same applies to those studying in other fields. I remember at Brandeis; political economy students were taking lab courses in GIS simulation and multi-variable calculus using advanced models and software. Business students were drawing from thousands of case studies from Harvard Business School journals!
Just look at the opposite.

Imagine that a student who graduates with a degree in software engineering cannot have a single hands-on experience in a marketable language that can teach him or her simple codes! The question is would it be the unfortunate result that the industry is not prepared to offer such a student an entry-level position?

As I write, I have just put down my phone after some prolonged conversation with a medical school graduate from Korle Bu doing her housemanship at our country’s premier hospital. Apparently, she had had to prepare her case for the next twenty-four-hour rotation involving twenty or so patients. And I guess she had to do all these in handwriting in a notebook. So, I asked, does the hospital not have software where all this confidential patient information can just be reviewed with a click of a keyboard?

Sadly, there is no such thing for a beginner! The system that was built and left behind by Guggisberg in 1927 has not only been denied physical renovation but also soft technology updates!

Is it not sad and unsurprising then that with our current way of doing things, everyone in Ghana finishes school and waits on the government for a job? The same reason that leads to such a conundrum also is what has made every polytechnic, now decorated as a technical university, sway from their original technical mandate to now offering business and arts-related programs and courses.

In essence, a Ghanaian PhD may well be not so responsive at this given time not only to the one who acquired it but also to the dire and immediate needs of the Ghanaian economy at large because of the precarious and archaic system on which it is contingent. Even those who argue that their Ghanaian-acquired PhDs are useful to their economic condition at this point in time, I believe they will realize that their contribution to the overall national economic development agenda is yielding little results.

It could be because they see no elation in training children with no available tools to work with or leaving kids at the vagaries of a system that does not care about what becomes of them! Who are to blame but our political leaders whose only speciality is to cajole the Ghanaian populace for votes, and hoax even PhD holders into becoming their foot soldiers, selling out preposterous and unfathomable policies that bear no resemblance to the teething youth unemployed situation that besiege us.