It is easy to point fingers but hard to prescribe solutions. Some believe that teachers are to blame for the recent poor results in the national examinations, others believe the government and the parents are to blame, while there are also those who believe that a combination of various factors is to blame. 

It is hard to swallow the argument of the ministry of education that the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic played a big role in the poor results. What Covid-19 did was to exacerbate the situation from bad to worse, but there is absolutely no doubt that Namibia’s education system was already in a deep crisis before the arrival of Covid. 

You reap what you sow. 

The problems in the education sector started a long time ago, and the widespread poor results are just a clearer manifestation of an old problem that is continuing to get worse. How do you expect students to pass biology, chemistry and physics if many schools are lacking the basics like laboratories and hostels? 

Past media reports of learners sleeping in dilapidated shacks comes to mind. To help us understand the journey of a learner throughout the education system, we will use a simple crop cultivation analogy to put the issues in clear context. 

The main idea behind crop cultivation is to reap a big harvest from the successful crops at the end of the process. Such a process can be contextualised as a project that has multiple stages from start to end, and it is crucial that in each stage, things go according to plan for the entire process to succeed. 

However, crops (or learners) will usually fail when the cultivation process (or education system) is not well-organised throughout the various stages from the beginning to the end. For purposes of analogy, we can view the home and school environments as the fields on which crops (learners) are cultivated (mentored). 

We can further view the parents and teachers as the crop cultivators (mentors) who are responsible for attending to the crops (learners) to ensure a good harvest at the end of the day. The roles that these mentors play are distinct but interdependent. For example, parents as mentors are responsible for preparing the field and fertilising the soil, sowing good seeds and nurturing the crops (issues related to practising proper child-rearing and upbringing), while teachers as mentors are responsible for playing a supportive role to parents and watering the crops and rooting out the weeds (issues related to commitment and dedication to the job of teaching, instead of just applying for the job to receive a salary at the end of the month). 

In addition, the government in this analogical context can be viewed as the supplier of critical inputs into the cultivation process such as cultivating equipment, irrigation water and fertilisers (classrooms, tables, chairs,  textbooks, laboratories, hostels, etc), hiring qualified and knowledgeable experts and supervising them appropriately, providing good salaries and incentives for motivating the teachers, among other key roles. It then becomes clear from this analogy that in order for the “crops” to grow successfully, many key stakeholders have various critical roles to play, and that such roles are interdependent. For example, the painstaking efforts of the teachers will be in vain if the parents are failing on the child-rearing and upbringing front. 

The great efforts of the teachers will further be in vain if the government is failing to provide adequate facilities, classrooms and textbooks. The reverse is also true; parents and government (even if the education budget is doubled) will be failed by non-performing teachers. In this complex equation, there are many socioeconomic challenges that are affecting the learners, parents, teachers and the government. The most pressing of those challenges are poverty and inequality (it is hard for hungry learners to concentrate in the classroom, despite the school-feeding program in some schools), broken homes (issues of neglected children), lack of resources as far as the government is concerned (issues of good governance and the fight against corruption at the national level). 

Society at large also has a role to play. What type of role models do we have in society when many bars and shebeens in urban areas are in close proximity to schools and homes? 

Nowadays, school-going children also seem to enjoy too many rights and liberties since corporal punishment was banished, leading to a deterioration in discipline and a total lack of respect for authority. Take a look at some of the Facebook and Instagram profiles of school-going children, and you realise that social media has also become a big problem. 

In conclusion, Namibia’s education sector is in trouble, and it will probably take many years into the future to address the intertwined challenges highlighted in this short narrative. There are no easy solutions to these problems, but a number of obvious recommendations can be made. First, parents have to take more responsibility to secure the futures of their children. Parental support and guidance should be provided in all forms. You made them, so you are responsible for them. Second, teachers must up their game. The argument that teachers must be required to undergo constant training to enhance their skills is a good one. Third, Government must improve on its strategies as far as the education sector is concerned. Leadership and management in that sector must ultimately take responsibility for transforming the education system towards an improved level. Fourth, learners themselves must realise that you can take a horse to a water point, but you cannot force it to take a drink. In other words, learners must work hard to pass. Success will not come on a silver platter.

* Abednego Katuushii Ekandjo is a former teacher, and writes in a private capacity.