Success reloaded with Hlengiwe

Former President Nelson Mandela once said: “It is only after climbing a great hill that one only finds that there are many more hills to climb”.
The President’s official pledge, later underpinned by the Premier’s 2013 State of the Province Address regarding the establishment and reconstruction of the University of Mpumalanga are a perfect correspondence to Madiba’s utterance.

According to the Premier’s report to cabinet this September, the new University is a ten-year project, thus allowing each young person who has interests in partaking, to gather the necessary expertise.

I want to pose a challenge to young people to an even greater task. In doing so, I wish to pose a few questions to all young citizens of this province in particular.

First and foremost, do we understand that as the youth, we have a big role to play in this project? If yes, what is our role? Last but not least, are we positioned for such a great task or at least working on positioning ourselves to be able to tackle this project?
The question is do we have enough academics in Mpumalanga to take on this huge challenge? My observation is that we do not even have half of the special skills and academia to be able to handle the university ourselves.

It will not be a crime to hire foreign academics or even national ones, but my fear is that doing so will seek to undermine or rather diminish the sense of ownership and public participation of our local youths which are pivotal in making this project not only successful but also sustainable and more plausible.
Maybe many of us had not considered academics as career paths, fair enough, we didn’t have motivation.

We have a new slate to work on now, and my understanding is that the more we are hands on in our own research, the more we will be able to be innovative and better able to comprehend our own communities and their impediments respectively more than any other person.

It will be easier to utilize the participatory rural appraisal approach to get to know and understand ourselves and be able to analyze trends and be able to design programs that are relevant to our situations.

This institution of higher learning is one that will allow us to produce information about our province according to our own reality, which will help minimize any biased reports that may have in the past resulted in misrepresentation by outside agents that do not necessarily understand our culture and frame of reference.
It is time we challenged ourselves as the youth of Mpumalanga because it could be very unfortunate if one day we see ourselves protesting against appointment of foreign academics in our own land, and unfortunately that will not help because academics are trained, not deployed.

The ten-year plan has been revealed, all faculties have been revealed to the public, so we already have an idea of what is needed.

My advice, young people should start preparing themselves for such a historic endeavor that is fortunately taking course in our lifetime.

I am challenging all young people who have matriculation exemptions to start applying to Universities now, those with junior degrees, there are a number of correspondence institutions where they can further their studies.

Mpumalanga Mirror will be championing the reportage on the project as it progresses throughout. With that said, I call on all young people to start developing a culture of reading and keeping abreast with provincial affairs in order to stay informed. After all, academics are all about knowledge acquirement and knowledge production.