By Timothy Kalyegira
Note: I first wrote and posted this piece on May 14, 2017 on my Facebook wall.
Have a read through it if you missed it the last time. It might help you to understand why 100 years of Gayaza High School, Namilyango College, King’s College Budo, Namasagali College, SMACK, Makerere University, Rainbow International School and so on have not changed Uganda and our chief export earner remains coffee.
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– Say you have an exam. Three questions or tasks are presented to the students.
1) Name the five divisions that make up Kampala City and the mayor of each division.
2) Where do you see Kampala City ten years from now? Describe it.
3) If you had the power and budget, what would you do to solve Kampala’s many problems and turn it into a vibrant, organised city?
THE FIRST QUESTION — Simple intelligence
To answer the first question or task, you need certain specific knowledge.
You need to take the initiative to read or ask around.
And you also need to have the ability to remember what you were told or read so that under the pressure of the exam, you correctly write down what you now know.
Many pupils with very low mental energy or drive or who have very poor memories, tend to fail these kinds of exams.
They usually drop out of school after P.7. Just to read a few paragraphs of information such as the five divisions of Kampala and their mayors, stresses their minds.
Most of us with some effort, threats from teachers or pressure from parents eventually develop the ability to read, revise and in the exam list the answers to such questions.
Some do so better than others and pass P.7 with top first grade marks, others lower first grades, others second grades.
We get to secondary school, still sitting exams in this format of receiving knowledge in class and expected to reproduce it from memory in final exams.
It gets tougher after S.3 but with struggle and persistence, many still manage to pass with first and second grades.
Many at this stage are starting to fall into third grade or out of school.
The amount of effort required to deal with ever more complex questions and tasks in math, history, geography, physics, literature or chemistry is mounting.
But since we are told education is key to a successful future, we struggle on.
Some get to university and pass with various class of degree. Others enroll in business or teacher training colleges. By this time, the number dropping off after S.6 has risen significantly.
From here those who stopped at S.6 and those who went on to university, the bulk of the future work force will come — hair salons, the civil service, teachers, policemen, importers of retail goods, restaurant and health club owners, grocery supermarkets, corporate jobs, self-employment, academia, and so on.
For many, though, reading books and newspapers will be tedious.
Finishing school was a struggle and a nightmare and after the final exam at S.6 or university, it’s a relief that the nightmare is over.
So no more reading of books. Books are a reminder of that nightmare of mental strain at school.
THE SECOND QUESTION — University-level formal education, basic specialist career, medium to high IQ
The answer to the second question, or the second kind of question, is much more difficult than the first kind of question or task.
In the first kind, one has to know to pass or answer correctly. One has to work with established facts and truths.
With the second question, there is nothing to work with. You are being asked to describe events, circumstances or a future not yet here.
There is no book, website or other research material that you can turn to, to read about the future of Kampala or to see what the city will look like in 2027.
All you have to go by is the present and the past.
A look at the present state of the city can give one a bit of an idea of what the future might look like and a few bright people can mentally put two and two together and write down their projections of the future of Kampala.
But most people simply can’t do that. They can only work with what is there, not what is not yet reality.
Even for the few brighter ones, it’s tough guesswork at best.
Most have not read widely or deeply enough into the planning of other cities or the history of urban development to realise that what might seem like intractable problems today might all be solved tomorrow.
Alternatively, the problems we see today might still be with us ten years from now because historically A, B, C, D and E factors make it difficult to reform or clean up a city within ten years.
We simply don’t know.
At this second stage, IQ becomes more important than educational attainment.
Since you are addressing a situation that has not yet happened, you must rely on your hunch, intuition, imagination or some intelligent guesswork.
You have to use your mind.
Your natural-born intelligence, IQ, perception or whatever you choose to call it, comes into play here.
IQ is basically the ability to think and learn, unscripted, in real-time. It is the ability to make the mental connection between A and B and see the implication of what the new AB situation means.
The few who can read widely enough or know deeply enough at this level become leaders of public opinion on radio, TV, in newspapers, in government, authors of books on the subject, leaders in industry, on social media, some in municipal council politics or elective office at the national level.
Others become consultants in various fields, be it law, security, accounting, architecture, engineering, computer systems, business, media, marketing and so on.
They have the skills or knowledge that the average person is incapable of obtaining or processing.
The average person can’t just become a police detective.
Not everybody can see the need to inspect a nearby dust bin for possible clues into if, by chance, the break-in thief last night might have thrown an item into it.
Most people can’t think or see like lawyers, which is why lawyers on average are well-paid.
Few ordinary people can see that what to them sounds like a causal and honest comment in court before a magistrate can actually work against them.
It takes a lawyer to mentally work out what one should or should not say in court. That is why even well-educated engineers or economists still need lawyers to represent them in court.
Certain levels of journalism also need this second category.
Most people even when present at the scene of a news incident cannot in their own words coherently describe what they observed.
That’s why most content on social media is still from established media or institutions even though in theory we are all potential news reporters.
Most of Uganda’s workforce falls under the first category and a few of the better known citizens fall under the second category.
You see this stratification all the time even here on Facebook and other platforms.
Most social media users can’t find the mental energy to write a paragraph or two on their own timelines and most of their time online is spend reading or responding to other people’s posts and photos.
Most people can’t form an original thought and write it down.
The best they can manage is write a comment to agree or disagree with what they have just seen on Facebook written by other people.
That is why gossip, politics, sports, young children and entertainment are the most widely-discussed subjects on social media.
They are the least mentally demanding.
The vast majority of managers, teachers, civil servants, politicians, businessmen and others running Uganda either did well in Question One exams or failed at them.
That’s part of why we find it difficult to think through and solve our many national problems.
THE THIRD QUESTION — Inner mental resources
In the third category, there are far fewer people still. This is the category that is virtually non-existent in Uganda and Africa.
To succeed in the third category, one has to have passed or have the skill and education to succeed at the first and second levels.
But this third level requires much more than just knowledge, work experience or academic qualifications.
It requires inner resources. Plenty of them.
It requires a person to be MADE OF METAL.
To turn a city around, to build a country, to start a company that goes on to become international, to start a brand of consumer product like Coca-Cola or Colgate toothpaste and it ends up in most homes in most countries in the world, requires complex, high-energy personality.
One needs enormous mental drive. Just the thought of the task ahead is enough to overwhelm most people.
At this stage of large-scale national and international projects, even scoring AAAA at A’Level or earning a first class degree or a masters at university is no longer sufficient.
That might explain why after we see them smiling on the front pages of newspapers after topping the UNEB exams, we no longer hear of most of these UNEB stars after they complete university.
This third category is all about application — applied knowledge and applied effort, and those two going together.
How does one start to modernise Bwaise or sort out the chaos in Ndeeba? Whom do you employ? What company does the work and using what machinery?
And where do you find the contractor you need? Do you advertise for them or simply select a reputable one?
Do you raze the whole place to the ground and start afresh or do you create new buildings next to old buildings? Do you build high-rise buildings or bungalow estates?
Do you evict all residents of the slum, rebuild it, and return them later or do you remake the slum into a high-end residential area and find its former residents affordable housing elsewhere?
Do you install traffic lights or build a commuter train system? Which do you do first, drain the flooded water or repair the road?
If you get an idea of starting a company like Facebook, BBC or Google, how do you turn it into a global giant? Where do you even begin?
Where do you initially store all that data, for example?
How do you handle the pressure of success, should you one day suddenly become a dollar billionaire at 29?
Will you still be motivated to run that Facebook or Microsoft, now that you are a young billionaire and money is no longer an issue?
Whom do you employ to design such a website and how much do you pay them?
How do you neutralise massive computer hacking incidents on your site?
How do you deal with foreign governments hostile to your social site that they think could corrupt their children’s values or cause political unrest?
If you have to build a bridge across a lake or river in a remote and hilly African country, how and where do you physically start?
How do you successfully take a space exploration robot into orbit around Mars and keep it communicating with the ground tracking stations?
That level of advanced planning, problem-solving, step-by-step thought, consulting with your team, multi-tasking, balancing layer upon layer of complex information and the demanding realities of managing both the broad strategic overview and the micro everyday detail, is not one for the ordinary person or ordinary country.
It requires much more of us than just good education. It requires inner strengths that very few of us have.
This explains why most roads, bridges, electric power dams, airports, highways, space satellites, aircraft, electricity and Internet data lines and telecommunication systems are largely undertaken by European, American and Chinese or Japanese companies.
Building an advanced, complex society requires certain cultural values, a certain intellectual orientation, huge amounts of mental drive and physical energy, good technical information, discipline, planning, motivation, persistence and an ability to clearly see in one’s mind what is not yet visible on the ground.
So far, very little in our culture, upbringing, education, political organisation, social relationships and temperament has prepared us for this level of complexity.
Even if we had the best of free and fair elections, presidential age and term limits, a small parliament, an independent media and so on, we would still need World Bank help or Chinese companies to build our dams.
That’s why I believe success for the individual and society depends on IQ, temperament and mental concentration.
Our present exam system, collective societal mindset and our present culture don’t address this third category.
I’m not even sure formal education by itself can address these third question matters.
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