Anna Nghipondoka: Disappointed by her own deeds
By Victor Angula|
With the recently released results of the Namibia Secondary School Certificate, the Minister of Education, Arts and Culture Mrs Anna Nghipondoka was reported as having said that she was disappointed by the poor performance of most of the learners – more so those who achieved nothing in Mathematics.
Now one wonders how someone can be disappointed at the outcome of her own deeds. If you bargain for failure, and then you achieve it, surely you cannot be disappointed.
If you look at the figures, you can see that most of those 5000 learners who have passed and will go to institutions of higher learning, they are from private high schools.
You cannot be disappointed at the outcome of your own plans. The poor performance of government schools is not something that is new. Every year thousands of children come at the end of their secondary education and leave the formal school system with certificates which indicate that they have failed.
And the main cause for this failure is the fact that children are taken through an academic education system where there is no love for reading.
And it is Mrs Nghipondoka and her predecessors who made it so, that children go through a system that expects them to do well academically even while they don’t want to read.
In Namibia there is no culture of reading. Yet you expect children to read their books? Children only read books at school when they are forced by a test or examination. It’s kind of torture –children reading although they don’t want to read, they don’t feel like reading, they hate reading!
You cannot achieve success by doing what you hate.
If you want children of Namibia not to be disappointing academically what you have to do is to inculcate in them a love for reading, so that they can read even while on holiday. Without the love for reading there is nothing you can do to achieve academic success but only failure upon failure despite the resources available in schools.
And nobody else can do this other than the minister of education. The minister of education is the head of the education system, and a head is there to lead and not be the tail like Nghipondoka is trying to depict herself.
If Nghipondoka is in a leading position but somehow she is unable to take the lead then she must resign. She cannot keep telling the nation that she is disappointed but she continues to sit in the same position of disappointment year after year.
