SPEECH DELIVERED BY H.E. DR. JAKAYA MRISHO KIKWETE, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA,
AT THE CLIMAX OF THE UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM
50TH ANNIVERSARY CEREMONY HELD AT THE NKRUMAH
HALL ON 20TH OCTOBER, 2011
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen;
I feel deeply honoured and privileged to be part of this joyous and historic event of celebrating the Golden Jubilee of the founding of the University of Dar es Salaam. This is an event that is truly uplifting and gratifying. To me, and I believe to all my great friends and former colleagues gathered here this morning, this isn’t merely a passing moment of commemorations, but also an occasion for jubilation. It is a moment of reunion and rejuvenation of a family bondage created on this University Hill and nurtured over the years through memories of the great school days here, and at times through social and formal official interactions.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to thank our brother and friend, His Excellency President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, for joining us on this auspicious day. As an alumnus of this great University, this is very much his day. I also thank him for his commitment to this family reunion and for his long standing and distinguished association with the University of Dar es Salaam. Similarly, I treasure the rare opportunity to meet with Professors, Lecturers and alumni from successive generations, from various professions and preoccupations, and from across the regions of our world. Thank you for your service to humanity at this University and elsewhere, and for making time for this reunion. I am equally grateful for the opportunity to once again meet with so many of our friends who have long been associated with this University in various capacities and at different periods. To you all, I say thank you for being part of this historic event.
Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen;
I wish to also use this opportunity to congratulate the successive governments of our country and the successive leadership of the University of Dar es Salaam from 1961 to this day for the momentous achievements made. It is no small achievement at all to grow from a tiny college offering only one programme to a comprehensive university offering education in a multiplicity of academic and professional disciplines. It takes a great deal of acumen, courage and sacrifice to engineer this phenomenal growth in a resource-constrained post-colonial country like ours. Above all, it takes an enormous amount of human ingenuity for a single institution to be able to fulfil the basic high-level human resource and capacity needs of an entire country for the whole period it has been in existence. I also wish to acknowledge the University’s role in training key personnel for other countries in the East African region. On these counts alone, the University of Dar es Salaam deserves recognition and a big applause.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
In addition to the developments and contributions I just mentioned, the University has played an important role in shaping our societies, intellectually, socially and through professional engagements. The Vice Chancellor has mentioned the radical intellectual debates of the 1960s and 1970s, which evidently were of significant ideological and political consequences in Africa and beyond. I would add two more aspects of the University’s meaningful engagement with society.
First, is the professional advice and support often given to governments and corporations, both at home and abroad, either by individual academics or particular establishments within the University. The efficacy of these services in various social, economic and political spheres of the country’s life is very well known.
The University of Dar es Salaam has also made an impact away from home. A number of experts and graduates from this University have been recognised and given leadership role in international and regional organisations as well as universities abroad. They have done our University and our country proud. As they excel and succeed in their responsibility they help spread the good name of our university and our country into the global arena.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
Another equally important aspect is the social impact that this University has made through voluntary public service. In the past 50 years, this has been the cherished hallmark or you call it an ideology of the University of Dar es Salaam. The University has been sending out students and staff to do practical training and voluntary outreach programmes in many parts of the country including remote rural areas.
During President Museveni’s days, voluntary public service involved using vacation time to take university students out into the bush and work with FRELIMO fighters against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique. The dynamic and progressive spirit came partly from Ujamaa and Pan-African ideology that this University embraced right from the beginning, and which it fosters to this date.
My own humble involvement in voluntary public service as a student at this University included working with villagers especially in the construction of their homes and critical services during the implementation of the country-wide villagisation program. I have fond memories of the last of such engagements which was at Fukayosi village in Bagamoyo District in 1974. I can assure you that those were great moments of exposure, learning and character building on my part as well as my colleagues. No doubt it has played a part in what I am today and my attitude towards developmental challenges facing our country. .
Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen;
I congratulate and thank most sincerely all the people whose imagination and persistent effort made the University succeed in playing its role so distinctively well. With deepest appreciation, I salute the father of this nation Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and his fellow founding leaders of our country for conceiving the idea of building this university. I also applaud the first administrators and professors for painstakingly bringing the University to shape. I applaud all the successive generations of academicians, administrators and students for keeping the University standing and ever progressive. It is gratifying to know that some of the great people who were involved in the early stages of the University’s growth are in attendance today. Allow me to recognise Prof. Patrick McAuslan who was among the three staff members who establish the Faculty of Law on 25th October, 1961. Prof. Yash Ghai and Prof. Sol Picciotto who worked at the University in 1960s and Prof. Abdul Hussein Paliwala and Prof. David Williams who were here in the 1970s. To them I say big thank you, congratulations and God Bless you.
To our former colleagues or teachers who, by the wish of Almighty God’s, could not see this day, I solemnly pray that their souls rest in Eternal Peace. And, to all of us who have been blessed to be here today or are able to follow these celebrations by other means, I say congratulations on the 50th anniversary of our Alma Mater, the University of Dar es Salaam.
Development of Education
Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen;
Allow me now to address some broader issues regarding the development of the education sector in our country. As we all know at independence, ignorance was listed together with diseases and poverty, as one of the three major enemies of our nation that we had to fight and win. That decision has guided our education development policy and efforts throughout the post-independence era.
I am proud to say that, much progress has been made and a lot has been achieved in the fight against ignorance since independence despite the disadvantaged position we started with. Today 97 percent of our school going children have space in primary schools compared to only 2 percent fifty years ago. We now boast of 15,816 primary schools compared to only 3,000 in 1961. We now have 4,367 secondary schools enrolling 1,638,699 students compared to only 41 Secondary schools with 11,832 students in 1961.
At independence, this was the only University in the country, born less than two months earlier. Today there are 40 Universities and constituent colleges. At its inception this University had only 13 young people enrolled whilst today there are 19,563. And, as I speak there are a total of 135,367 students enrolled in universities across the country. Tanzania’s progress in education has won recognition globally hence the MDG Award on Education given to our country by the United Nations in New York last year.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
We know that we still have a long way to go and a lot more work to do. We need to continue to expand access to education at all levels for our young men and women in order to cope with demand from our fast growing population. Also we have to keep abreast with the levels reached by other countries in our region.
When I was nominated the Presidential candidate for my Party CCM in 2005, I constituted a small team of bright Tanzanians to be my policy advisers. This University provided a sizeable number of them. One of the things we looked at seriously was education. I was intrigued by the comparative statistics of education development in the world, Africa, our region and our country for the year 2004.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
There were 132 million university students in the world, of which Africa South of Sahara had the lowest number of 3,300,418 only. Arab countries had 6,517,436, Latin America and the Caribbean 14,601,908 while North America and Western Europe had 32,868,944. Of the 3,300,418 students in Africa South of Sahara, South Africa 717,973, Ethiopia 172,111, Kenya 108,407, Uganda 88,360 and Tanzania had 42,948.
Africa also had the least number of university lecturers. Of the world total of 8,475,673 lecturers in 2004, Sub-Saharan Africa had 140,709 only. South East Asia had 2,412,257 and Latin America and the Caribbean had 1,147,396.
With regards to secondary school education, the situation in Africa was the same. Of the 503,054,515 secondary school students in the world, South East Asia had 160,278,253, Latin America and the Caribbean had 57,108,671 and North America and Western Europe together had 62,686,626 students. Sub Sahara Africa had 30,576,317 students only and Ethiopia had 4,505,507, South Africa 4,186,882, Kenya 925,341, Uganda 619,519, and Tanzania 524,325.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
It is these statistics that informed our decision on the need for unprecedented interventions to expand secondary and higher education in terms of building more schools and colleges, increasing enrolment of students, making available teaching and learning facilities, and the training and recruitment of more teachers and lecturers. I resolved that it could not be business as usual nor should we leave it to the normal evolutionary path of growth. That was not desirable for our country. Tanzania is the largest of the three original East African countries and had the biggest population, so to have the least number of boys and girls in primary, secondary and universities was a big contradiction. It was not acceptable and, therefore, it warranted urgent attention to redress the situation.
It is this understanding that led us to come up with the several policy decisions and actions. One of these is the construction of Community Secondary Schools (Sekondari za Kata). In this model the Government goes into partnership with the people and build secondary schools in the communities. It has worked. Some 3,337 schools have been built so far. As a result, available statistics show that by 2008, we were able to catch up with Kenya and Uganda. The number of students enrolled in our secondary schools rose to 1,222,402 as compared to 1,382,212 in Kenya and 1,088,744 in Uganda. Today, we have 1,638,699 students in secondary schools, having more than trebled from 524,325 in 2004.
In the same vein, university student enrolment increased from 42,948 in 2004 to 95,525 in 2009. Comparable figures for Uganda and Kenya in 2009 are 90,396 and 122,874. Today, through expansion of facilities at existing universities and the establishment of new ones, we boast of an enrolment of 135,376 university students. Among the monumental achievement in this regard, is the construction of the University of Dodoma. The other thing which helped to increase enrolment in private universities was my decision to extend student loans to include students studying in private universities. Before that loans were extended to students studying in public universities only. In fact, it is the provision of this facility that encouraged expansion and building of new colleges by the private sector. Prior to that students’ loan budget seemed adequate but, now it is very much stressed and has become a source of friction between students and the Students Loans Board. We are determined to smoothen matters.
Challenges of Expansion
Ladies and Gentlemen;
The near exponential expansion in secondary and higher education has created its own challenges. But these are welcome challenges because they are related to the need to consolidate and advance the progress being made. They include the need for teachers and lecturers, textbooks and teaching aids, laboratories and housing for teachers and lecturers. But, these happen to be the challenges we have been grappling with since independence and throughout the lives of our four successive governments. However, they have become more pronounced now because of phenomenon expansion that has taken place during my time.
Our decision to give the education budget highest possible priority in government resource allocation is the appropriate response to address these challenges. Of course, we need to stay the course for another 5 years to straighten and strengthen matters. So far so good. We are witnessing encouraging progress being made in all fronts and huddles towards improving the quality education are being eased in primary, secondary and higher education. The expansion in enrolment of undergraduate education students from less than 1,000 in 2004 to 53,551 this year will wipe out the shortage of teachers in secondary schools. In this regard, last year alone the number of teachers produced by our universities was 12,470 compared to 500 only in 2005. We are also intervening in textbooks, science laboratories and teachers housing. There are great prospects ahead.
Higher Education
Ladies and Gentlemen;
With regard to higher education, we have conceived a five years Higher Education Development Program (HEDP) 2010 – 2015. The program has five major priority areas:-
(1) Staff development comprising long-term and short-term training;
(2) Rehabilitation of existing infrastructure and construction of new facilities;
(3) Provision of teaching and learning materials e.g. laboratory equipment, books and computers;
(4) ICT application across core institutional function and strategies; and
(5) Research and outreach.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
The implementation of this Programme requires a minimum of annual investment of 52 billion shillings. Of course, for a poor country like ours, with a GDP of merely USD 25 Billion, this is a very tall order indeed. But, we in government, are determined to fund this programme as we did with PEDP and SEDP. We will do so through our own budgetary allocations, seek support from our development partners and involve the private sector. We will work with university authorities as well as institutions and persons of goodwill to explore innovative and creative ways of advancing the implementation of HEDP and find solutions to some of the problems facing our universities.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
I would like to reaffirm the government’s desire to see more private sector participation in building universities in the country. We will also continue to extend higher education loans to students enrolled in private universities. As alluded to earlier, it is because of including students from private universities that the budget of students loans increased from 56.1 billion in 2005/6 to 317.9 billion this year. This has enabled us to increase the number of students getting government sponsorship from 16,345 in 2005/6 to 93,105 this year. Actually the number of first year students (24,625) who will receive loans this year is larger than the total number of all University students who received loans in 2005. As alluded to earlier, we will continue to make our loan delivery mechanism more efficient and transparent for the purpose of finding a lasting solution to complaints and dissatisfaction that has been expressed on the current system.
The University of Dar es Salaam
Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen;
Let me go back to the University of Dar es Salaam. The Government has noted with admiration the strides that the University has taken in expanding enrolment and diversifying its academic pursuits. We are equally cognisant of the challenges the University had grappled with in its long journey to the 50th anniversary. In order to address the acute shortage of students’ accommodation, the Government will assist the University to construct a large hostel on the Main Campus that will ultimately accommodate 4,500 students. I am told the situation with halls of residence No.2, 4 and 5 requires urgent attention. We will look into it. The government will, also, assist the University to implement its plan of constructing 450 housing units for the academic staff.
We also welcome the initiative to establish a students’ centre and, as you are all aware, my brother President Museveni and myself have personally participated in various efforts to raise funds for this project. In addition, and as I promised in January this year, the Government will continue to support the project through ordinary budgetary allocations. I would like to see the construction of the centre start as soon as possible so that students begin to enjoy the anticipated benefits sooner than later.
Ladies and Gentlemen;
I have been informed of some delays in the implementation of the Government’s initiative to construct seven new buildings on this campus through the World Bank-funded Science, Technology and Higher Education Programme. These buildings, once completed, will go a long way towards alleviating the current shortages of laboratory equipment and space, seminar rooms and office accommodation. We shall make every effort to ensure that the obstacles are removed and this project is implemented expressly. I call upon the responsible officials in the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training and the University to ensure that preparations are completed so that construction can start as soon as possible and the project is completed in the shortest possible time.
Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen;
The University of Dar es Salaam is the pioneer University in the country. It has occupied the enviable position of moulding the cream of the human capital and leadership of this country and the region. The University has always been a think tank of our nation. With that history, experience and dedicated service, this University is best placed, despite the increase in the number of universities, to continue to be the leading university and the leading think tank of the nation. It is high time the University of Dar es Salaam remoulded itself into the University of Excellence, dedicating itself to producing leaders in the various academic and professional disciplines taught at this University. It is good for the University in these times of competition to have a new product different from what the others are offering. But, it is also good for the country to have a reliable source of high calibre experts and professionals.
I know this means recalibrating the curricula of various courses to meet the needs of going beyond quality to excellence. The need to produce the best of the best of experts and professionals. It also means more investment in enhancing the University’s capacity to fulfil this obligation and meet expectations. We, in Government, are prepared to assist you in this noble endeavour. Think about it, if agreeable come up with plans and programmes to get there. We will be ready to navigate together with you until you reach the ultimate objective.
Conclusion
Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen;
It would be remiss of the if I concluded my remarks without recognising the sterling work done by my predecessors, President Mwl. Nyerere, the brain behind the founding of this University and its first Chancellor, he built this University from nothing to the world class it is today. President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, the second Chancellor for the work he did in dealing with service constraints, President Mkapa for initiating the expansion of the University.
I wish to take this opportunity to once again congratulate the University of Dar es Salaam for the 50th Anniversary and to sincerely thank all individuals and organizations that made contribution to make this great University what it is, in the 50 years of its existence. I wish you even greater success in the next 50 years and many more ahead of this University.
I thank you all for your kind attention.