IT is highly heart-warming that education is one of the spheres on which the fifth phase government under the stewardship of President John Magufuli is addressing very serious attention.
For education is one of the driving forces of national development, since only people who are solidly educated can contribute to the realisation of that critical goal.
If social, economic and even political sectors were placed under the charge of uneducated or scantily educated people, they wouldn’t make appreciable headway.
It may be recalled that, ignorance was one of the three most serious impediments to development on which the first post-independence, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere-led government declared it would tackle.
The others were poverty and disease. Somewhere along the post-independence way, things started going astray, various factors conspiring to dilute the importance of education.
One of the most disturbing was the demotion of academic pursuit, being rivaled by cleverness related to criminal tendencies.
Ridiculous respectability was conferred on a species of people operating under the presumably fanciful cover of “mission town”.
They comprised people who hadn’t made much headway on the academic or professional front, banking instead on expertise at dirty tricks. Disturbingly, this species penetrated and forged alliances with unethical elements in the public service.
Deal-making emerged and became an industry of sorts, and thrived, due to even some weak-hearted officials at various levels joining the dirty schemes.
By the time the fifth phase government had come into being, much damage had been done, prompting President John Magufuli to painfully remark that “whichever way you turn, you see dirty deals”.
Those deals, plus a host of other misdeeds, is what the current government is spiritedly determined to curb. Much headway has been made on that front, to the extent that, the value of education, and attendant professional competence, have been restored.
Since deal-fixing is being combated zealously, many people are conscious that the era of short-cuts is gone. Hence the President’s no-holds-barred approach in tackling evils, corruption being the most disturbing, to which end he periodically drops appointees who don’t meet the grade.
That’s the scenario into which fits the recent shake-up in the Home Affairs ministry, over which he has ordered a probe by the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau over a suspicious 1.2 trillion shillings deal. The war continues unabated!
