Since 2006, the office of Gulu Mayor has failed to attract the elite. A candidate’s academic requirement is not a prerequisite for one to qualify to be a Mayoral candidate.
A few months ago, I was invited by a small group of friends for an informal meeting and I was asked to run for the office of the Mayor as the elite voice committed to advancing education reforms in Gulu Municipality.
Now the elections are over. The elite voices lost. On Thursday last week, as market women were celebrating the victory of incumbent mayor George Labeja, they sang songs of how an uneducated candidate had outwitted his educated opponents( Labeja’s critics derided him for his lack of a formal education).
The market women reminded me of a woman who once lamented that if she had it her way, she would not educate her children since educated children migrate leaving their parents while the uneducated ones to take care of their old parents.
Western education makes one mobile and distant from his community hence attains a different identity and value system.
So what made educated candidates less electable compared to their less educated counterparts in the Mayoral race? Why did our local community disassociate themselves from the educated candidates?
In my opinion, education divorces us from our African identity instead of integrating us in our community to gain acceptance and relevance. It isolates us from our communities’ beliefs, values and ways of life.
Education is crucial in any type of society for the preservation of the lives of the members and the maintenance of the social structure and to promote social change.
Whenever Acholi engage in electioneering, they cast their votes to punish or to reward a candidate. Unfortunately as education empowers an individual; it instills in one a different value system. Western education makes Africans more selfish and to think more about themselves than about their traditional communal life. For instance, in this mayoral race, we (elite) concentrated our issues on our career and academic achievements rather than the insecurity concerns of the market women and boda riders who voted overwhelmingly.
Omolewa Michael in a review paper titled, British Colonial Education Policy in Africa argues that Western education is “too European,” and therefore, ill-suited and irrelevant to African needs, and that in the process, the indigenous values of love, community relationships, and profound spirituality were being lost (Omolewa, 2006).
Hence in this election, the focus of elite candidates has been what they individually accomplished yet the less educated candidates’ focus was on how collectively they addressed social concerns like empowering women groups.
Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o wrote in his book “Decolonizing the Mind” displays his anger towards the isolationist feelings western education causes. He writes:
The process annihilates people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves (Thiongo, 1981).
Therefore, if you are an educated candidate with western values and belief system, you are strategically detached from your community. You lose your identity to a community you belong to and become less attractive to be voted into a public office to serve your community.
While western education has been a major factor resulting to the failure of elite candidates; there has also been factors like inexperience in local politics as compared to the experienced less educated councilors in local government service.
As the elite played by the book and observed the rules of fair play during electoral process; the less educated were good students of Machiavelli who believed in the “end justifies the means”. They were less afraid to use popular vulgar language, malpractices and corrupt means like ferrying voters and calling each other witches.
Besides, the rift between Acholi power brokers as evidenced by misunderstandings between FDC’s Hon. Ojara Martin Mapenduzi who adopted Independent candidate Labeja George (incumbent) and Hon. Norbert Mao who supported his fellow Democratic Party candidate Hon. Otim Geoffrey. This changed the election issue into who will outsmart the other. It became a race between a Mentor and his mentee and less about the competence of the best candidate.
Therefore, as we pursue western education, it’s imperative that we try as much as possible to remain original in our value system and lifestyle.
The government need to reform the ideology of our education system to enable us remain purely African yet literate to universally acceptable standards. This reform must focus on building necessary skills to earn a living as opposed to regurgitating knowledge and changing our identity and value system.
Conclusively, western education makes you lose your identity and isolates you from your community but also doesn’t make you identify equally like those in a western world. In the near future, inability to get elite voted to public office will affect the decentralization efforts hence poor service delivery as Gulu transitions to City status.
The author is Aliker David Martin a former Gulu Municipal Mayoral aspirant and can be reached at mdaliker@gmail.com