Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-Zimbabwe has too many PhD holders who are useless in terms of adding value to the nation, Deputy Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education Dr Godfrey Gandawa has said.
Speaking in Harare on Wednesday, Gandawa said there is need to change the curriculums of various levels of education so as to produce personnel that can develop the country through innovation and design.
“We need to move from useless PhD’s that we see in this country”
“Most of the people we call Dr hold useless PhD’s for purposes of title when they can’t do anything useful. It’s now modern to have a PhD”
“We call each other Dr so and so but what are we bringing to the country? A PhD must offer a solution but we have Dr’s who are content to live with potholes instead of coming up with solutions”, he said.
Dr Gandawa said in the modern world, to avoid useless PhD’s, the University chooses topics for its students and the country needs to move in that direction.
“When choosing topics for a thesis, what problem do you want to solve? If we do that we will be able to patent and commercialise, we will come up with products that will change the country”, he added.
Buttressing the same point the CEO of Zimdef F Mandizvidza lamented how the country’s high literacy has been another useless statistic.
“There is very little to show for the high literacy rate that we have as a country. We must be producing products and changing the global market but none of that is happening”
“We need to develop STEM competencies within our country”
“Currently we have a lot of people who are good at reading and writing but implementation in next to zero”, he said.
Zimbabwe has seen a high number of people enrolling and getting PhD’s for a variety of fields of late leading to dubious institutions flooding the market whilst offering sub-standard education.
Prof Jonathan Moyo, the Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education has been leading the STEM initiative which aims to increase the number of people equipped with knowledge in sciences as a way of driving the industrialisation of the country.
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