Trying to overcome a deficient professional class through education and by cultivating a performance-based society
Last week,
New Vision reported that Rwanda is recruiting teachers from Uganda to
teach in its schools. Many Ugandans may have seen this as an opportunity
to get a well paying job, but the story reflects a severe skills gap
that bedevils Rwanda. It is not simply about lack of English teachers.
Rwanda lacks very basic skills to help it achieve many of its ambitious
development plans and objectives.
As a
regular visitor to Rwanda, I wonder how that country achieves the things
it has given its paucity of skills. For example, it is very likely that
seven out of every ten barbers in Rwanda are Ugandan or Congolese. If
you are building a house in Rwanda, seven out of every ten plumbers,
electricians, masons, carpenters, bricklayers, etc will be Ugandan – or
at least not Rwandan. Equally if you take your car to a garage for
repair it is possible that for every ten mechanics, six will be Ugandan.
In nearly
every routine service, it is difficult to find skilled and experience
people in Rwanda. According to a judicial census carried out in 1992,
there were only 37 lawyers in Rwanda’s judiciary. After the genocide in
1994, either as a result of having been complicit in the genocide or
having been killed on account of it, only two lawyers remained in the
country’s judiciary. In 1994, RPF inherited less than 20 doctors, yet
within its own ranks it had 36 doctors. All this is largely because
there had been limited investment in education and skills in Rwanda
before 1994.
For
example, between 1962 (when it got independence) and 1994 (when the RPF
captured power), Rwanda had graduated only 1,926 students from its
national university at Butare. That was equal to one year’s graduation
at Makerere University in 1985. In fact, the system of education made it
difficult for the university to produce skilled professionals like
doctors, lawyers and engineers. For instance, the national university
would admit a cohort of 20 students to do medicine, a course lasting
five years. Then there would be no fresh admissions until this cohort
had finished its course and graduated.
Moreover,
the system worked in such a manner that along the way many students
would drop out of medicine and do an ordinary bachelor’s degree. At the
end of the five years, only five or six students would graduate as
doctors. But since there was no concept of Year One, Year Two, etc, it
meant that after five years Rwanda would produce only five doctors; in
ten years, it would produce only ten doctors. The same applied to other
professions.
Thus, when
the genocide came, it eliminated an already miniscule professional
class as many educated elites were either killers or targets of the
killings. The RPF therefore inherited a critical skills gap, which it
had to fill using returning exiles (who were mostly Tutsi) and other non
Rwandans. This history partly explains why there is a disproportionate
number of Tutsi (relative to their numbers) in key positions in all
spheres of Rwandan life – the government, the private sector and civil
society.
The
alternative would have been to hire people into key positions because
they are Hutu i.e. to create an appearance of proportional
representation. This has been the strategy of most governments in
post-colonial Africa. By co-opting many Hutu elites without
qualifications into the bureaucracy and other key positions purely on
their identity, the RPF would have created an appearance of ethnic
balancing that has been the magic bullet to legitimacy and social
integration in most of post-colonial Africa.
Instead,
more than any government I know in Africa, RPF has based its legitimacy
largely (certainly not entirely) on performance, especially through the
delivery of public goods and services. Why did the RPF choose this
route? Possibly its leaders felt that it could not trust Hutu elites
enough. If it based its legitimacy almost entirely on co-opting Hutu
elites, there was always the risk that they could defect. In fact RPF,
which is Tutsi-led, had tried this approach in the mid to late 1990s.
But because it lacked shared objectives with its partners, all too often
there were tensions in its alliances leading many Hutu elites to
resign. Such resignations could easily strip the RPF-led government of
its legitimacy. Therefore, it is very likely that this fear has been a
major driving force of performance-based legitimacy in Rwanda.
I also
believe that this is the one special factor that has set Rwanda apart
from its contemporaries in Africa. It is also a factor that undermines
the argument that Hutus are marginalized. This is because to access any
service in Rwanda, whether government scholarships or medical insurance,
it is your claim to citizenship that matters, not your ethnic
background.
Since
2000, Rwanda has tried to rapidly increase the skills in the country
through massive education. For example, the university output has grown
to over 10,000 graduates per year. The country also produces 6,000
graduates from vocational schools per year. However, getting a diploma
in masonry or electrical engineering does not mean you can do a job
well. That also requires getting on-job training and experience.
Thus,
almost 80% of new graduates from Rwanda’s vocational schools cannot find
jobs immediately in the country because private companies find the more
experienced Ugandans more attractive. The challenge for Rwanda really
is not one of marginalizing one group over the other–it is a lack of
skills. With the new recruitment drive for Ugandan teachers, one hopes
the RNC will not start to claim that Rwandans – both Hutu and Tutsi –
are marginalized by Ugandans in the job market.
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