By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
Unexpectedly, on 17th June 2024, I received a call from a friend abroad whom, for the purposes of this article, I will call Mark. After greeting me, he said:
“I read your article titled ‘The Educated Fools of Uganda”. Even if you titled it “The Educated Fools of the World”, it would still apply because that is what global education, stressing disciplinary knowledge production and disciplinary production of human resources, has done: Producing educated fools”.
He went on, “You were right to describe the educated fools as “…. educated fools are people who have tons of academic achievements to their credit and are full of bookish knowledge, but have very little practical experience and common sense. They lack real knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insight’’.
He said, “Even if you added “‘They over-glorify themselves and believe they are very educated yet they have been miseducated by narrowing their knowledge to small pockets of knowledge, leaving most of the knowledge behind”.
It is true they undervalue experiential knowledge yet that is the real knowledge of interactions, adaptation as well as understanding the changing human environment. This carries a lot of sense.
Faced with the changing environment, the educated fools are totally useless and helpless because their little, but deep knowledges in their small pockets of knowledge are inadequate, even collectively, to address our challenges, problems and issues that the changing environment engenders. No doubt the solutions they separately recommend as individuals only complicate the environmental situation and become like pollutants of the environment or the new environmental problems we have to contend with. No immediate answers to them
Then Mark said, “People wonder why there is so much corruption in the world today as if it was not there before. Even the Vandals of Europe were corrupt people whose actions disrupted life and corrupted the knowledge world by destroying libraries in Alexandria, Egypt, and in Rome. The truth is that corruption has always been there, but it has been accentuated by the kind of education that stresses individual achievements and glorification of the individual, separating him or her from the total environment or total society”.
Mark paused a bit and then told me, “Write an article titled from Educated Fools to Educated Thieves”.
I asked him why, and he retorted back: “Don’t you see that the thieves of today are predominantly the people you referred to as the educated fools? Before, the thieves, even the pirates at sea, were not those who went through the global education system. They were local traditional people wherever they lived. Look: even at universities professors are stealing, but if you agree to write the article you have to explain why thieving has mushroomed at university campuses and the whole human society. You have also to distinguish between local traditional thieves and the educated thieves.
I told Mark I would write the article with the title he suggested: “From educated fools to educated thieves”.
Let me begin with a quote from Shiv Khera: “An uneducated thief may steal goods from the train but an educated one may steal the entire train. We need to compete for knowledge and wisdom, not for grades.”
Indeed, the educated thieves in leadership of today can even orient an entire budget in their favour, denying their country and people meaningful development in order to satisfy their greed and selfishness. They are uninterested in the adage “Together we rise or sink”. The education they received removed essential knowledge, wisdom and understanding from them and equipped them with consumptiveness, acquisitiveness, selfishness. They are everywhere and in every institution. They organise society in their favour. It is worse if they are political leaders who are also in business and commerce. They will enact laws and make policies in their favour and ensure the flow of services, energy and money is in their favour. They may give tax holidays to each other and create many avenues for themselves to avoid paying taxes while putting the burden of paying taxes on the poor and needy.
Thieves are thieves, whether educated or uneducated. We should, however, not ignore the truism that the majority of people who are educated do not have long fingers and are working hard and contributing their best to develop, transform and better the quality of life for themselves and their families as well as the quality of society of which they are integral to and part of.
Any person indulging in looting or stealing, educated or not educated, is mostly driven by internal motives, desires, circumstances or situations. Others see others looting and stealing and they assume that it is okay for them to loot or steal too.
Before I proceed, I need to distinguish further between the local uneducated thief and the educated looters, some of them professional thieves.
As one judge once said, “An educated thief is capable of causing more havoc than a robber with AK 47 gun”. His or her actions will wreck the lives of others, women, children and whole generations.
The judge was handing down custodial sentences to former Chief Executive Officer of Microfinance and Small Loans Centre, MASLOC ( Starrfm.com.gh) in Ghana.
The judge also expressed concerns about how public officers inflate the prices of items they procure for the state by short-changing the public purse.
Among other things, educated thieves willfully cause financial loss to a country through their actions. If arrested and convicted the counts will comprise of conspiracy to steal, stealing, causing financial loss to the State, causing loss to public property, Improper Payment of Public Funds, Unauthorized Commitment resulting in Financial Obligation for the Government, Money Laundering, and Contravention of the Public Procurement Act.
In Uganda today we are hearing of Members of Parliament conniving in the Parliamentary Commission and in the budget-making process to defraud the country of billions. Some MPs have been arrested and are languishing in prison, pending their cases being determined by the Anticorruption Court. Others have been summoned by police over parliament-based corruption. The ruling party is considering removing its members from the Parliamentary Commission accused of having paid themselves billions and replacing them with others. Besides, the party has strategized to remove the power of electing the members to the Parliamentary Commission to the Party Executive.
Various institutions of government are also suffering from the actions of the educated thieves. One scholar told me that theft has become so common even in the universities. It is not surprising. It is the universities where the educated thieves are produced that are wrecking institutions with their looting and thieving. However, it is unlikely that if students proposed to study the looting and stealing in the universities, their proposals would be cleared. Yet it is true that the university campus operates with the same cultural expectations as the streets around the campus.
It is true that the government of Uganda has launched a corruption eradication crusade at least in Parliament, but not in the universities yet. For the universities it would require serious studies of looting first, but as I said, it is unlikely that students wishing to carry out such studies would be okayed to proceed.
If the struggle to free the country of educated thieves is to be successful, it must include freeing universities of educated thieves as well.
As Richard West has recently written in Quora, there aren’t many “educated” thieves that will honestly answer the question “Why do you steal?” He writes, “The problem is people who steal won’t answer this truthfully because they are not honest. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be stealing. Everyone else that doesn’t steal is just speculating as to why. They make excuses like, maybe the person has to do this to survive or they have a mental illness…..”
The truth is most people who steal do it because they are greedy and selfish. They do it because they have justified it despite knowing that stealing is wrong. We have seen in the Parliament of Uganda Members justifying stealing in the Parliamentary Commission by saying that the law allows it. No doubt if the law exists it was made by the educated thieves to justify stealing of public funds.
Richard West writes, “People steal because they want things. They want money for drugs or they want expensive things to impress their friends. People steal for the high. It makes them feel powerful to take something from someone else ( or the public) and get away with it. Sometimes after achieving this high, they will want to do it again and again and this might even lead to addiction”.
So, if there is drug addiction, there is looting or thieving addiction. If we are to be effective in dealing with the educated looters and/or educated thieves, we must embrace Bet Kamya’s (IGG’s) or Singapore’s successful method of fighting corruption: the Life Style Approach, which matches legitimate income to the riches of the educated looter or educated thief. Later will be too late. Anything else may relapse into pettifoggery in the courtrooms, with most educated looters and educated thieves cleared of any wrong doing even if there is overwhelming evidence that what they have is not commensurate with their legitimate income, and must have been accumulated only by taking what is not theirs by virtue of their offices.
Primitive accumulation of wealth is real, and is a new imperialism as I once wrote.
For God and My Country.
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