by
Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.
Professor of Sociology
Author of “The Bridge” – the transatlantic romance adventure novel.
On a Sunday blue sky afternoon in May 1972, I finally stood on the balcony of the fourth floor of Africa Hall 5 Room 26 as a freshman at the University of Zambia appreciating and surveying the beautiful scenery around and below. The lawn was green with gorgeous flowers and short bushes. Different types of music were booming from record players from many students’ rooms. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and excitement about the better times to come of gaining a University education which my family and I had not even ever dreamed of even just months before in January 1972 when I got an acceptance letter from the University of Zambia.
Entrance to the University of Zambia.
My room was furnished with brand new wardrobes, book shelf, desk, reading lamp, chair, blankets, clean bed sheets, blankets, and pillows. The bathrooms had good new hot showers, a line of clean wash sinks with shinning mirrors. The hall floor toilets were clean with toilet paper which was replaced virtually every day. These clean toilet facilities were also all over campus classrooms and the library with toilet papers. Hall sweepers cleaned the rooms every day. This was the case in the 5 residences of Africa Hall, Kwacha Hall, Presidents Hall, and International Hall. The women’s was October Hall. Thefts of property on campus were unknown. Supper that evening in the main dining hall was a five course meal of soup or a salad, rice with chicken or beef, custard with cake, fruit, coffee, tea and bread with butter. We had pocket money of K25.00 and an allowance for purchasing text books at the bookstore for our classes.
It was very exciting to sit for the first time in Lecture Theater One and Two for lectures by may lecturers at the time including Professor Robert Serpell and Professor Muyunda Mwanalushi in Psychology and many other courses. We had some of the best professors and lecturers from around the world since we did not have too many indigenous Zambian lecturers yet. The University of Zambia had an enrollment of fifteen hundred. The cost of room, board, and tuition was four hundred Kwacha per year. My father earned K19.00 per month as a primary school teacher with 9 children some of whom he had to pay school fees for. My family could never afford for me to attend the University of Zambia.
The vast majority of Zambians could not afford the cost of sending their sons and daughters to the University of Zambia. The government provided bursaries for everyone because the country needed educated highly skilled labor.
Thousands of Zambians who graduated from University of Zambia will forever love the University of Zambia and will always want the institution to remain alive. All of us graduates are dedicated to do whatever we can to help support the University. This is why the problems that have continued to beset the University of Zambia are always deeply troubling for all graduates, former students or alumni of the University Zambia as well as for all concerned citizens.
University of Zambia Problems
Since the great days of the early 1970s during the last 43 years, the determined men and women of UNZA have proudly continued to graduate students who excel both in Zambia and the international diaspora although the university has faced major challenges that would have made other institutions buckle and disappear. The list of problems is so endless that this article cannot know nor address all of them. These discussions and proposed solutions are not meant to imply that the author has all the solutions but rather to make some very pragmatic suggestions according to this author’s view.
UNZA Alumni-Diaspora and Lecturers
There are 5 possible serious problem areas and proposed possible immediate and long term solutions to some of the deeply embedded problems of the University of Zambia. The first and probably the most serious problem is lack of a culture and an organization that can both coordinate and mediate mutual cooperation and trust between UNZA lecturers and older graduates some of whom are retired and some may be in the diaspora. All the thousands of UNZA graduates all the way back to its inception in 1966 who are in Zambia and especially those in the diaspora are deeply devoted to the institution. Day and night they are proud and would like to help the University of Zambia. But there appears to be lack of a culture and prominent organization to channel this desire to help.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there may be mutual suspicion about the intentions of the graduates who are in the diaspora and those at UNZA. The same mutual suspicion also applies to national leadership where Zambians who are in the diaspora are regarded with suspicion if they express a desire to participate in the electoral process or seek political electoral office. Although many of the lecturers at UNZA may have been also trained abroad, there is an underlying suspicion that any diaspora graduate coming to UNZA may be looking for a job to displace the indigenous younger faculty or looking to unfairly dominate the institution. Some of the diaspora UNZA graduates may harbor a superiority complex. Both of these attitudes would have to be resolved before any long term plans and actions can be mutually executed to help University of Zambia. We all deeply love the institution and badly want to help it survive and prosper. This potentially may be the most serious problem that may hinder or impede any potential progress initiated by the two wings of the UNZA graduates or alumni.
Capital Expenditure
Since the early 1970s, the University of Zambia has increased its enrollment from 1500 to about 30,000 in 2015 which is an overwhelming increase of 1900%. Has student housing or residence halls, teaching and classroom facilities increased by 1900%? That is probably not the case. According to The Post of 8 May 2015 Page 2, UNZA has deplorable conditions with lecturers having 250, 298, 500 to 1,000 students in a class with some sitting on the floor.
A few years ago during a Presidential election campaign one candidate promised that if elected they would improve the conditions at UNZA such that 19 students would not be sharing one residential hall room. I was stunned but was never able to verify that my room like Africa 5 Room 26 could be occupied by 19 students. During most of the early years at UNZA, there were only 2 students per room.
This is a troubling reality that affects not only UNZA but all public institutions that offer services in Zambia; the demand increases as the population grows but there are never enough resources to accommodate the increasing demand. How can we get the resources to increase capital expenditure? Although government might be the solution, there is much more that alumni or graduates of UNZA can do to build the new, necessary and needed infrastructure to expand the institution.
Lecturers and Workers Conditions
The lecturers should be the best paid since donations and endowed Chairs could account for some of the pay. Some of the best conditions could be arranging for lecturers to take sabbatical leave to institutions where UNZA graduates are teaching and researching in foreign institutions. All UNZA lecturers could have a designated counterpart UNZA graduate lecturer at other institutions abroad to work together for research and exchanging some of the new cutting edge teaching pedagogy. May be we could have lecturers abroad who are UNZA graduates to give live lectures by skype as guest lecturers in one of the current UNZA lecturers’ courses as a donation. The other way round is that current UNZA lecturers can provide guest lectures to University classes abroad where lecturers who are UNZA graduates are teaching at colleges and universities in the diaspora.
Since I began teaching here in America 25 years ago, I tried to use appropriate supplementary textbooks by some of my Zambian colleagues and authors in the courses I taught in the early 1990s. There is a possibility that a live lecture from an UNZA lecturer would provide a valuable source of course material for my students who often cannot afford to fly to Africa or Zambia to attend a lecture at a Zambian or African institution. Many times I took my American students to the University of West Indies Mona Campus in Jamaica where my students attended many lectures by Jamaican lecturers for a fee that was paid to both the lecturers and the University. University of Zambia could to the same today via skype or closed circuit television.
Refurbishing of Residence Hall Rooms
Some of the most passionate desires among all UNZA graduates in Zambia and abroad are to refurbish and paint their dilapidated old rooms in the Halls of residence. The word is that the late President Mwanawasa did refurbish his old room in President Hall. This is one of the easiest tasks that a new organization can arrange. When University of Zambia students are on a break between terms, teams of UNZA graduates with their families, friends, and children would come to campus and paint rooms every year. The best way would be to install plaques in each room listing all the graduates who resided in those rooms since the University opened. This could be a continuing tradition in which every UNZA student upon graduating would be expected to help take care of his or her former room later in their lives.
Library, Classrooms, Equipment, and Landscaping
UNZA needs library resources, adequate classrooms, equipment for teaching and research and landscaping to maintain the beautiful grounds, very modest donations by all former graduates could take care of some of the expenses. For example, if we assume that UNZA had graduated a conservative total of 8600 students over the last 43 years, how could they make donations? If each one of the alumni or the graduates donates K500.00 ($71.00) each, that would yield K4.3 million. If they donated K721.00 ($100) each that would yield K6.2 million. There should be a new approach in which all donors’ names should be recognized on campus by engraving names of each donor in relevant places, buildings, and rooms. Their names should also be put on the UNZA web page.
Vison for the Future
University of Zambia can be stronger even produce better graduates for the future. In order to achieve this, we ought to have a better vision for the future for the institution. Simply doing the same things we have done since 1966 may not be enough. Professor Lameck Goma, the first Zambian Vice-Chancellor of the University game a famous graduation speech in the early 1970s titled: “The Usefulness of the Useless Disciplines”. University of Zambia focused intensely on training students to occupy skilled jobs in the Zambian economy that were under tremendous demand. Disciplines such engineering, medicine, law, computer science, business, education, economics, biology, agriculture, and mathematics were regarded as “useful” disciplines. But disciplines such as the arts, music, philosophy, poetry, anthropology, literature, theater, and dance were regarded as “useless” disciplines because they could not help Zambia provide the technological skills we urgently needed for developing the nation at that time.
Prof. Goma was arguing that we needed knowledge of the arts to lead fuller both personal and intellectual lives as a nation. I agree with Prof. Goma. University of Zambia needs to introduce the arts. How this can be done is subject to proper planning and discussion. For example, University of Zambia should build a state of the art Performing Arts Theater and center. This could be a source of employment, income from the community as all audience attending events would pay for all national and international performances. A performing arts center would also be a training ground for future artists, film makers, creative writers, play wrights, dancers, musicians, ethnomusicologists, opera writers, opera performers, stage and film actors. Virtually all UNZA graduates are good technocrats but very few of us are capable of infusing the arts into our work.