Education had a real theme once upon a time: Self-reliance. In the 1960s, I imagine this was a matter of national pride and perhaps a little bit about state-building. In the 2010s, solid literacy and basic analytical skills are fast becoming a matter of survival.

Recently, when a couple of individuals showed up in my e-mail inbox asking whether I could further their material welfare by providing a job or school fees, I was struck by the desperation. No one in their right mind would ask someone who writes for a living to help them with financial security since we’re only one shaky step up the money ladder from crazed bajaj drivers and petty criminals.

Still, the underlying point is a poignant one: What they are really asking is how can they hope to get out into the big bad world and earn a living without poverty rolling over them like a runaway upcountry bus. I do have an answer for those of us who are unemployed by our anorexic formal labour market: Your creativity is your labour market advantage. Most of us are going to have to invent our jobs and ride our own brains on the journey from subsistence farming with a hand-hoe, to the bright lights and city smarts of the middle-class lifestyle.

We do this thing in Bongo, where we foist nicknames on shaky public initiatives. Usually the original terms will be generated by some slick marketing schemers and then subverted by smart-alecks for everyday use. One that has come to prominence in the past few years was introduced by a mobile phone service provider that came up with a way to increase the speed at which customers could send and receive airtime credit. The product name became a by-word for extremely fast service. On the darker side, the same product name is also applied to any big scheme that shows little evidence of deep thought or awareness of the long-term consequences.

I don’t imagine that the Big Telecom in question is particularly happy about their one-time campaign becoming a byword for shoddy work and half-baked schemes. Of more importance is the fact that the idea of instant gratification has begun showing up when we discuss governance, when we discuss public services and generally when we raise issues of opportunism. And if there is one thing that we do love in Bongo, it would be an opportunity looking to be taken advantage of.

There is nothing particularly wrong with a little short-term thinking, since life rarely co-operates with the plans we set for it, and she who eats must eat today. In the private sector, this attitude has its uses: You dress it up in a tie and call it “business sense” or “entrepreneurship” and you are good to go. In the field of development, you say something like it is a scheme that can be “rolled out rapidly” to “maximise positive impacts while integrating cross-cutting issues and including a social media component that will allow project beneficiaries to participate fully in their own empowerment through integrated approaches” and leave it at that.

In the public sector, however, there is no distinguishing between opportunism and bad governance. A country cannot be run on the same principles as a fast-food outlet. It is an entirely different ballgame; when governments in developing countries cut corners in education and in health, the result is that some people get that much closer to mortality, and others get trapped in the hard-to-escape ghetto of low-income jobs. That’s why most campaign promises aren’t worth the paper they are printed on — anyone promising quick solutions to deep problems is lying shamelessly.

Take our recent ward-level secondary schools and our teacher training programmes that went into recruiting warm bodies to teach the kids crammed into those schools. Instant gratification… or is it? Our government tried to cut corners in education in order to boost its enrolment numbers and as a consequence the quality of education offered at these schools is more often than not appalling. And yet public education is such an expensive undertaking, you would think we would be a bit more focused on it. I think the old slogan got it right in one: Self-reliance.

How can we liberate the potential locked up in every Tanzanian student and boost their innate ability to invent a legal means of earning a living? How do we bury forever the socialist hangover notion that our governments can or even should “create” jobs for us, when we can do it ourselves? I don’t know what that means in terms of policy, but I do know that governance solutions that take their cue from mobile phone companies aren’t helping. All they do is produce young men and women who are desperate enough to ask a writer about how to earn a living.