A good curriculum? This one exporting graduate security guards, housemaids?

Almost everyone in Uganda has for the past 34 years been deriding and castigating the school curriculum saying it produces unemployable graduates. But when the government moved to introduce a new curriculum which in a nutshell is supposed to produce a “fully skilled” person equipped with practical know-how, the people’s representatives (Parliament) rose up in arms — on procedural grounds.

But first, let us quickly bring you up to speed with the 34-year-old war on the old curriculum. When the now 34-year-old government of President Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986, it had a then elderly (now deceased) Prime Minister Dr Samson Kisekka. The elderly physician from Nairobi did not waste time once they took power and started touring the country giving his version of motivational speeches. His message was clear — the education curriculum was wrong. Using the image of a key, he said that the colonialists had given us a wrong key which failed to open our mind and kept it firmly shut.