What if Malawi’s private universities merge?

Education is a service. It is a right. It is also a tradable commodity. Education is a business. 

The education provided by the State and faith organisations is often a service as it is heavily subsidised by taxpayer money or tithe or zakat collections to ensure that even students from poor backgrounds can access it. Education is seen as a human right which every citizen must afford and access. Teachers in such schools are paid by the State because the State knows education is a liberator in many senses. 

It liberates one from trite thinking, attitudes, and culturally oppressive customs and traditions. It liberates one from lies and liars. No matter who they are; where they live, and how monetarily rich they may be. It liberates one from abject poverty. It liberates one from living a life of servitude.  Education is a bond-breaker. Education is critical for the development and transformation of society. And this is where we disagree with modern Althusserian disciples who anachronistically still argue that education is one of the ideological State apparatuses (ISA) of control.

Perhaps, a century ago, education was used to control how to think and what to think about but that, we argue, is no longer the case. With knowledge abundantly available online and search engines, including the likes of AI, easily searching the worldwide web of knowledge archives, what one learns and knows today can no longer be controlled, iron-fist-like.

In Malawi, primary school education is, on paper, a good example of education as a service. In other countries, such heavily-subsidised education extends up to secondary or high school.  During the regime of Ngwazi Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, primary school was minimally paid for but university education in Malawi was heavily subsidised and tuition, accommodation, hotel quality meals were free to the student until the mid-1980s.

The sacrifices countries make to offer heavily-subsidised education are justified not only as a form of conformity to the UN and other human rights charters and protocols on education as a right but also as a means of developing an effective human resource for those countries. Education enhances efficiency and creativity. Elsewhere, but not in Malawi, education enhances transparency and accountability.

Education provision can also be a private business, the commodification of a service, a human right. In Malawi, very few schools, usually only international primary and high schools, operate as full commercial entities. Most private schools ask for just enough fees to keep the schools running and teachers paid.  Elsewhere private schools, including private universities and colleges, deliver better education than their public counterparts because they have adequate capital from investments, fees, investors, endowments, philanthropies, private donors, and can afford to attract the best teachers and professors, and equipment.

Where education is thought of as a business, the owners and investors think as business people and their focus is on generating profits from fees and other education-related businesses. If they note that their education enterprises are almost collapsing, the owners and investors sell them off to concentrate on viable businesses or agree to merge them so that their capital is pooled to make the education strong and robust.

In Malawi, we have many private universities, some financially-successful but most are struggling.  Why can’t the struggling private universities merge to form one large private university to better serve Malawians, make more money and benefit from their shareholding?  

The Association of Private Universities in Malawi (Apuma) may need to think seriously about a new approach to making their individual member investment work for them. Merging Apuma members into one university may be one such approach.

When lions frequently attack small livestock herds grazing in different areas, you may protect the herds by merging them into one large herd and asking the herdsmen to work as a team. So, goes a saying from uMzimba.