If you spend any time at all on the Internet, especially on a certain extremely popular social media site that allows people to post whatever debris they dredge up from the depths of the interwebs on your timeline, you will have seen it. If you have Friends like mine, it is usually stranded between a revoltingly cute picture of a cat in a bonnet, a delightfully tasteless joke, and a theologically questionable status update explaining why Jesus is Your Saviour.

It will be the picture of a barefoot youth in some undisclosed African location who has crafted a cellphone, a pool table, a particle accelerator out of mud and sticks and sheer ingenuity. These pictures are meant to produce strong reactions in the viewer: Amazement, amusement, a respect for the creativity of those who don’t have much to work with. And that aha-moment when the viewer realises that a barefoot African kid is actually a proto-scientist with dreams, a fantastically charismatic smile and a knack for mud-and-stick technology.

In me, these pictures produce an overwhelming frustration. They remind me how much intellectual power we let slip through our hands every day, lacking the will to provide education, skills and knowledge to the majority of our citizens. Our traditional methods of addressing questions of human development are letting us down. We’ve been getting excited about our so-called resources —speculating in gold, producing gems, rubbing our hands over the fossil fuels lurking underground, and getting ready to rape the Serengeti so we can bring more uranium into the world. Yay?

We’re not up to managing these resources. Not when we have ignored our most important factor: People. Not when students are “graduating” from schools unable to read or write, and this has been going on for years. Graduating? Ha! Where do we imagine the skilled labour to master a complex economy and a complex society is going to come from, exactly? How many of us even know what uranium is, let alone what we’ll be mining it for? Our system has created a nearly unbridgeable divide between those who can read and those who won’t be allowed to contribute their natural talents to the polity. I used to believe this to be just another effect of our broken public sector, but I am beginning to suspect it’s worse than that.

Having to endure a free media is bad enough, but developing a public that can read and digest the information provided by this free media is even worse, isn’t it? After all, a literate society is able to make informed choices, and informed choices are always threatening to a centralised state with despotic tendencies. You can understand why letting our education system continue to fail is... perhaps not against the interests of certain parties.

Our state has been claiming for years: We are too poor to put citizens through school. Clearly “poverty” is a relative term, as evinced by our government’s embarrassing large collection of Toyota’s and Mercedes’ top-shelf products. Using the poverty gambit to excuse what amounts to a sophisticated and sustained crime against the people is just sad, and insulting to the intelligence of a public that can’t always read but is not at all stupid.

This isn’t a new form of evil; literacy has been discouraged before in women, peasants, slaves, blacks, the poor, the colonised, the landless, virtually any group that has valid reason to change an unjust system. Since withholding public education is frowned upon in this day and age, governments are resorting to more sophisticated methods, like monitoring the ICT sector.

In Tanzania, we still bother to ban books and movies “for the public good,” which is the kind of old-timey cluelessness that makes me wonder if my government is itself equipped to deal with contemporary realities. I suspect not. I have been to too many government offices that still place a doily and a vase of plastic roses on top of a monitor which has clearly not been switched on since the IT guy installed it. In 1995.

Here’s a thought: How about if we gave those doily-covered computers to the kids in the pictures with the smile and the imagination and see what they can do with them? Meanwhile, we transfer our dopey public servants to the basement of the public sector, with a commensurate drop in salary. They can spend their time chasing the Ghost Workers that haunt our government’s payroll, with pangas and illegible handwritten notes. The money thus saved can be used to put our newly-computerised kids through school. That way we can look forward 10 years down the line to pictures of young African men and women, in a disclosed location, wearing lab coats and holding up their inventions, this time made of titanium and bio-engineered tissue rather than sticks, and mud, and frustrated hope.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]