Secondary and Higher Education needs of South Sudan

By John Gachie.

With a peace dividend in the Sudan ever looking more likely as progress is made in the peace talks the country, especially South Sudan faces a gigantic task of social and economic reconstruction and rehabilitation.

For the people of Sudan and their benefactors, they have their job cut out for them. It will not be an easy task not with all the social-political and economic problems facing the South. The task will call for well-thought out and focused policies that will help the people, first and foremost recover their dignity, pride and self worth.

The policies will also have to seek reconciliation, peace and security and above all, seek to tap the human resource potential for nation-building. It is the nurturing and empowering of this human potential that a Secondary and Higher Education policy for Sudan and in particular, South Sudan is paramount.

This must be viewed in a historical perspective. It was only in the middle of 1900 that attempts were made to provide a modern or contemporary education in the South. Indeed, the first secondary school was built in 1949 and when the first national Sudanese University was opened in the late 1950s with a student population of 1000, only 5 per cent were from the South. Even in the military establishment, out of a total officer corps of 800 only 8 or one per cent was from the South.

In this regard, the systematic discrimination of the people of the South in education and other social services were an entrenched aspect of the political and administrative structure. Indeed, technical and vocational training was discouraged as a policy, while business and commercial education was for all practical purposes a no-go area. The sum effect was that at the dawn of Independence in 1956, the lot of the people of the South was dismal. As a report carried out by an International Non-Governmental Agency in the Sudan says “ The Colonial period 1890-56 left the peoples of Southern Sudan with severe handicaps when it came to development towards a more modern society compared with the situation of other colonized peoples in the African continent.”

According to the report, the ruling class in Khartoum used education as one of the most effective method of weakening the people of the South. It draws parallels with the Apartheid regime in South Africa, which too, used education as a tool of racial and economic suppression of the African people in the country. The report further says in Sudan, this discriminatory approach was in hindsight even more insidious than the Apartheid South Africa.

The issuing of a decree in 1957 by the Khartoum government that all education in the country should follow the curriculum used in the North and that the language of instruction be Arabic, further discrimination against the people of the South was entrenched.

For the Christian missionaries who had carried the biggest burden of education in the South, the effect of the decree was that most had to close their institutions. A better illustration of the tight grip and suspicion with which the Khartoum Government viewed any departure from their forced policy of Islamization of education occurred in 1975. In that year, the then High Executive Council of Southern Region passed a decree that allowed the use of local languages in schools. The Khartoum government labeled such a decree as an act of aggression against Islamic cultures. This became the first of a series of showdowns between the Central government in Khartoum and the regional Council that eventually led to the outbreak of renewed fighting in 1983. In the interim, most of the South Sudanese students who aspired for high education sought places in East Africa, in particular Kenya and Uganda.

South Sudan has over two million dead, over four million held-up in displaced peoples camps in and around Khartoum and another two million people internally displaced in South Sudan. Over 350,00 as refugees in the region, the South then has a major human resource deficit. These people, mostly within the age group of six to 45 years are the most productive group and their potential must be nurtured and channeled to the re-building and rehabilitation of the South.

For the provision of semi-skilled and clerical-cum-junior administrative cadre of human resources, South Sudan faces a nearly depleted capacity. When it comes to middle and high level personnel, the capacity is almost non-existent, not to mention professional of technical personnel. The war and a combination of other factors has put paid any effort to train or retain such a cadre. The majority is either on the run or holed up in refugee camps or displaced peoples camps in the north.

Unconfirmed figures used by the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) Education Secretariat say there are over 20 secondary schools in the entire South or the liberated area.
The assessed total student capacity is slightly more than a 1000, which works out as measly one per cent of the anticipated one million youth with a need for post-primary school education in the region. In the entire South, only three-post secondary education institutions exist, mostly in the areas near the border with Uganda, while the Yei hospital, also close to Uganda, the trains less than 200 para-medical staff per year.

In teacher training, no capacity exists at the moment and the 6000 plus teachers in the South are virtually all untrained while the number of women teachers is slightly more than 600. There is neither harmonized or standard curriculum nor syllabus not to mention textbooks and other educational materials.

To compound the tragedy further, little by way of funding has been sourced for education and the international community is more focused on relief interventions. In this regard, the creation or development of a human resource base in the South has lagged far behind any other activity in the South. The total funding for educational and human resource development so far in the South is according to figures given by donors about six million US dollars, while relief and other humanitarian assistance interventions run into hundreds of US million dollars.

For most donors, education or any other long-term capacity building intervention is hampered by lack of funds, security and safety of their personnel and local human resource base. However, most are more inclined to engage in short-tern interventions as dictated by the state of security and conflict.
However, if South Sudan will be assisted in social-economic development and long-term sustainability, the provision of a trained manpower resource base is paramount. This will help the region and indeed the entire country in dealing its past and provide the local impetus for growth and change.

As a local clergyman said, “Education is the future for it gives hope and with hope, life.” And South Sudan needs hope and life in abundance.