Is Climate Change real?

The twenty-second session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 22), the twelfth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 12), and the first session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA 1) were held in Bab Ighli, Marrakech, Morocco from 7-18 November 2016. Zambia was represented at the conference by President Edgar Lungu. During the Conference, President Lungu reaffirmed Zambia’s commitment to take action on climate change. The President said Climate Change has the potential to reverse developmental gains made by the country in the recent years.

 However, despite the international scientific community's consensus on climate change, some critics continue to deny that climate change exists or that it is a hoax caused by humans. Although some level of debate is useful in looking at the issue of climate change, society must eventually move on and actually address this global phenomenon. As one author puts it “to do nothing about the problem of climate change is akin to letting a fire burn down a building because the precise temperature of the flames is unknown.”

Zambia has not been spared from the effects of climate change. For instance, despite having abundant surface water resources, reduced rainfall has caused reduced water levels in major water bodies in the country. Moreover, population increases in urban areas have also put pressure on groundwater through mismanagement of this scarce resource. The hydro-electric power generation has also been negatively affected by the droughts and floods. Drought has had devastating effect on the hydropower generation in Zambia which has significantly led to economic reduction in the power generation hence causing power rationing as the country depends largely on hydropower. The resultant effect has been the loss of productivity in critical sectors of the economy such as mining, manufacturing and agriculture.

 In the agriculture sector, reduced productivity and perennial food shortages are some of the effects of climate change. Particularly crops and livestock production are affected by increasing temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and more frequent and intense extreme weather conditions.

In terms of human health, studies have indicated that the vulnerability assessment shows that the entire country is at risk to a multitude of other climate-sensitive diseases such as dysentery, cholera, respiratory infections and malnutrition. These diseases are more pronounced in the provinces that are most vulnerable to climate.

What is the Paris Agreement on climate change all about? The Paris Agreement builds upon the Convention and for the first time, brings all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, with enhanced support to assist developing countries to do so. As such, it charts a new course in the global climate change effort. The Paris Agreement’s central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Additionally, the agreement aims to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.

Zambia signed the Paris Agreement on climate change on 20^th September, 2016 when President Edgar Lungu appended his signature to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change during the Treaty Event at the High-Level Segment of the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This renewed the country’s commitment and resolves to take action on the ground that can put the country on a path to sustainable development. This therefore, means that Zambia has ratified the Paris Agreement on climate change and only awaits necessary measures to ratify the agreement to the United Nations.

Therefore, the formulation of a national policy on climate change will be another important milestone for the country in mitigating the impact of climate change. It is however, worth noting that Zambia is in the process of adopting a comprehensive National Policy on Climate Change which has been formulated and only awaits Cabinet approval. The goal of this policy is to support and facilitate a coordinated response to climate change in the country. It is aimed at enabling the country re-align its climate sensitive sectors of the economy and its society in order to meet its developmental goals through adaptation and mitigation interventions.

 Although the Paris agreement will always be paper commitment by countries, Zambia will have to do much more to reduce the impacts of climate change on the ecosystem, food security, environment and economic production. The solution to climate change therefore, is to help reduce carbon pollution and make renewable energy like wind and solar power more affordable. Other measures will include sustainable management of forests and strengthening early warning systems. All these efforts will require substantial financial commitment by government and other cooperating partners including the mainstreaming of information provision and access to all stakeholders to meet the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Finding the rightful place for our youths in today's society: the case of Max vs Innocent

In our world today, science, technology and society are undergoing dramatic changes. The rapid increase of knowledge in a wide range of disciplines is triggering off scientific and technological developments that deeply affect our lives and transform our culture. Innovations in many fields, for instance, in information and communication technology have led to what is now called the “knowledge society”. Knowledge is becoming the key resource in our societies and a central factor in political, social and economic decision making. It is however, saddening to see a dearth in intellectual discourse and knowledge based dialogue as a process social cohesion especially among young people. 

Ideally, this should have been a time for many of our young people to read and acquire knowledge about the science and technology of nuclear technology, robotics, android development, android applications, financial modeling, HIV vaccines, environmental protection, Climate Change, medicine etc and make the results of such discoveries as a basis for sound debate and decision making. However, this seems not to be the case for many young people in our country.

Recently, two separate amateur videos went viral on social media featuring youths from two known political parties challenging each other to a boxing bout at Mulungushi Conference Centre after a verbal exchange. There is no doubt that these videos set Zambian social media alight with many likes, comments and tags. This brought some few thoughts to my mind; Could this be why we have more gymnasiums in our communities than public libraries, more mushrooming taverns and shebeens than institutionalized school systems, more alcohol sales than the annual turnovers of all water utility companies put together etc? What about our political parties, are they engaging these youths who constitute the majority of their members in meaningful programs to prepare them for key leadership roles of the country? What is even worrying is to see youths who are supposed to be key players in the decision making process of our country to begin showing signs of intellectual dwarfism and suffocation.  This is what the videos of these two youths reflected, a society that has lost sense of its direction.

Instead, this should be time to engage deep intellectual fights, fights for and against ideas and not physical fights or violence against each other. This is the time for reading and discovering new knowledge and ideas to improve the lives of people in communities. Our country today needs charismatic and honest young men in politics who can motivate and inspire their fellow youths to change the status quo. Our current status, where youths in political parties are only used as agents of political mayhem is unsustainable and detrimental to the future of this country with its great potential. Sadly enough, the few intelligent men and women who can actualize the Zambian ideals are also avoiding politics because of the ‘dirty’ tag that has for a long time been attached to it. There is need for young people to come out of wherever they are and take on the mantle of leadership in our society. Many people in our society today still think nation building and the political process of decision making are the exclusive preserve of the old people and as such youths should not be given a chance. Perhaps, such perception of youths explains why youths are merely said to be leaders of tomorrow, and not now.

This is the unfortunate mind-set that seems to have informed or misinformed the pattern of successive national leadership in our country. This cliché in some way has sedated many youths and created in them a sense of reluctance in participating and taking up leadership roles and responsibilities that can help in the social, economic and political transformation of our country.

Although the definition of youth varies from culture to culture, community-to-community and country-to-country, the United Nations defines youth as a male or female aged between 15 and 24 years, whilst Commonwealth Youth Programme defines youth as a male or female aged between 15 and 29 years. The 2006 National Youth Policy defined a youth as a male or female person aged between 18 and 35 years. However, the 2015 National Youth Policy for Zambia defines a youth as a male or female person aged between 15 and 35 years and statistically constitute the majority in the population of our country.

However, when it comes to youths taking up leadership and decision making positions at the different levels of our communities, the majority of youths are relegated to the gutter and the inferior positions where they cannot make any meaningful impact in the decision-making processes of many social and political organizations or institutions in our country. This exclusion in the decision making process of our society is part of the problem facing many youth and has incapacitated many of them not to fully partake in issues of nation building and development. However, in a broader sense, youth should refer to people who have the energy, drive, vigor and enthusiasm to get things done. It is a state of mind not a function of age, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over cowardice and an unquenchable appetite for progressive reasoning and not conduits for social instability and violence.

University rankings; Does it matter?

Since the mid-1990s, the country has witnessed a proliferation of local and foreign higher education institutions. Education provision in Zambia had become fragmented and uncoordinated in the absence of an integrated national regulatory framework. This led to the repeal and replacement of University Act of 1999. Thus the government enacted the Higher Education Authority Act No. 4 of 2013 to enable higher education providers to operate according to standards applicable to all public and private institutions and accreditation processes that would provide incentives for quality improvements and protect students from unregistered higher education providers.

However, Zambia's top tertiary institutions have in the recent past continued to record a record low position on the latest rankings released by Webometrics. Since 2004, the Ranking Web (or Webometrics Ranking) publishes twice a year (data which is collected during the first weeks of January and July), covering more than 24,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. According to Webometrics, The University of Zambia (UNZA) has dropped in ranking from 23rd to 55th in Africa while the Copperbelt University (CBU) has dropped from 152nd to 239th in Africa in less than a year.

The rankings of our universities, both public and private should be of great concern not only to our university authorities and academicians but also the nation as a whole. This is because university education is more than just the next level in the learning process; it is a critical component of human development worldwide. It provides not only the high-level skills necessary for the labor market but also the training essential for our country’s teachers, doctors, nurses, civil servants, librarians, engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, social scientists, and a myriad of other personnel needed for the social and economical development of any country. It is these trained individuals who develop the capacity and analytical skills that drive local economies, support civil society, support the education system, lead effective governments and make important decisions which affect the entire society.

It is thus highly likely, that the rankings of our learning institution on the global, regional and national scale have an effect on the credibility of graduates, research, knowledge and other products that are churned out from these universities. There are a number of factors, other than a university’s open access and transparency policy, promotion of substantial increases in the volume and quality of their electronic publications that influence the rankings of universities globally. According to Thomson Reuters (2012), a university’s research capacity and performance in terms of number of academic staff (including research staff), research income, income per academic staff member and the number of papers published per million of research income are all factors that influence the ranking of universities. There are also other factors such as number of papers published per (academic and research) staff member, global research reputation, research output, total citations counted, doctorates awarded per academic staff member and number of papers published per million of research income.

Universities are also gauged on their institutional performance such as the number of undergraduate and post graduate degrees awarded, overall student/academic staff ratio, institutional ratio income per academic staff member, institutional income per student (in total enrolment) and the number of staff engaged exclusively in research as a proportion of all academic staff.

Other ranking factors include international diversity, that is international academic staff as a proportion of all academic staff, published papers authored jointly by at least one international academic staff member as a proportion of all papers published, international student enrolment as a proportion of total student enrolment, new international undergraduate intake as a proportion of total new undergraduate intake, international research reputation and international teaching reputation. Both our private and public universities should thus be evaluated on how well they have scored on the above score card.

However, the enactment and operationalization of the Higher Education Authority Act of 2013 in Zambia should among other things address the recent reported poor ratings and standing of our public and private universities by enabling a system for establishing equivalences with other higher international education systems and also make Zambia’s higher education system operate in a globalised learning environment.  Thus, the recognition of qualifications and credits as provided for in the Higher Education Authority Act should enable students to move from one international higher education systems to another and compete favorably both on the local and international labour market  and industry.

Private universities also have a duty to improve on the quality of their teaching, research and reputation performance by investing highly in quality teaching and research staff, proper library infrastructure and ICTs if they are to earn local and international credibility. Public universities such as the University of Zambia and the Copperbelt University which had been the only mandated institutions to provide university education in Zambia before the repealed and replaced University Act of 1999 should also consider repositioning themselves by diversifying their source of funding (away from the traditional funding from the government), improve on research, technological innovations and scholarly publications, sustain the Public Private Partnership initiatives in university provision, maintain close linkage between the university and industry and  increase their capacity to generate new knowledge for the benefit of our country’s national development.

Will the Higher Education Loans and Scholarship Board be the solution to university education financing?

Government announced on Wednesday March 9, 2016 that it will operationalise the Higher Education Loans and Scholarship Board in January 2017 next year after Parliament adopts it. The recent reforms announced by the Minister of Education Dr. Michael Kaingu are not new to the running of the public universities. The Government made efforts to introduce student loans in 1989 when a Working Party on Student Loans was appointed during the UNIP Government. The recommendation of the Working Party was that all citizens admitted to accredited higher education institutions should be given the option of applying for a student loan to cover tuition fees, and other direct educational expenses like personal allowance, living expenses and transport. The Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology announced in 1989 that students admitted in higher education institutions would from then on be funded through student loans. The student loan scheme was, however, not implemented. Instead, bursaries still continued to be the mode of paying for the education of students at the two public universities.

On 30th April, 1997 then President of the Republic of Zambia, Mr. Frederick Chiluba, appointed a Commission of Inquiry “to investigate all aspects of life and operations at the University of Zambia and the Copperbelt University.” The appointment of the Commission followed the concern of the Government and the President in particular over the incessant disturbances at the two universities which quite often compelled university authorities to close the institutions.

The Commission comprised eight (8) members including Justice Bobby Bwalya as Chairman. Among the recommendations of the commission was that the Government should introduce a student loans scheme for needy students to assist them meet the cost of tuition and personal welfare; the commission further recommended for an establishment of an autonomous statutory body to administer the student loan scheme to be established by the Government to replace the Bursaries Committee. The body was to be known as the Higher Education Loans Board. Thus the decision by government to operationalise the Higher Education Loans and Scholarship Board in January 2017 as announced by the former Minister of Higher Education Dr Kaingu was not only long overdue but a move in the right direction.  One of the ways in which government meets the cost of students in public universities is through students finance or bursaries.

Student finance refers to the money received by students whilst in the university in order to assist them meet maintenance and education material costs. These include costs for tuition, meals, books, accommodation and projects. Most of the university students who are sponsored by the Government receive bursaries which cover the cost of meals, accommodation, tuition, books and projects. These bursaries are non refundable meaning that benefiting students are not obliged to repay back once they graduate.The only qualification for a bursary is admission in a public university.  According to the current practice, all students on government sponsorship at the public uinversities receive their meal allowances to buy their own meals. The allowances for projects are paid to those students taking courses that require projects. Book allowance was reintroduced in January 1997 and the government policy was that it was to be paid directly to the university bookshops. Currently, students are paid book allowance in monetary form as an allowance.

According to the 1997 Bobby Bwalya Commission’s recommendations, the justification for paying students allowances stermed from the idea that University students remain a privileged lot in the country.Most of the students who went forward to submit evidence told the Commission that society owed them something for being intelligent. Some students argued that they were the cream of society and that the government was therefore obliged to pay them for their intelligence. The Commission further noted that these ill-conceived attitudes by students still prevailed under conditions where the government had made drastic changes in the mode of financing and providing various services in the country such as cost sharing measures.

The Commission also observed that the size of the bursary scheme had been increasing over the years. The amountof money going into student bursaries had risen to the level where it was almost equivalent to the total amount of grants the public universities get from the government. The Commission noted that funding for student welfare was therefore rising to levels far higher than what was spent on the core functions of teaching and research in the public universities. According to the Parliamentary Hansards, in 2014, then Minister of Education Dr John Phiri said in parliament that out of the K395.5 million, bursary allocation to students at the University of Zambia (UNZA) for the year 2014 stood at K91, 161,907. The Minister explained that in 2014 alone, UNZA received a supplementary allocation of K57, 700,000, bringing the total allocation to the two universities, including the Copperbelt University (CBU), to K191, 825,179. Dr Phiri said that it was to be noted that the annual allocation to the ministry for the execution of the bursary programme was insufficient, hence the supplementary funding which was requested for by the ministry. He further told parliament that the budget for sponsorship of students takes into account the returning students as well as the new ones. Therefore, as a way forward, the decision to transform the bursary scheme into a loan scheme as a way of operationalising the loan scheme by the government and transforming the Bursaries Committee into a Loans Board which will be overseeing the revolving fund is the most sustainable and cost effective way of financing our public universities.  Although to me is what the nation has been waiting for, it remains to be seen whether the loan scheme will be a solution to the challenge of university education financing in Zambia.