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Chapter Five New Challenges within the Global and Local Objective Conditions This chapter focuses on the new challenges of global scale and unprecedented magnitude that the African continent has been facing in the post-colonial era and which constitute additional hindrances to education, while at the same time a relevant education with a solid higher education system is needed. The globalisation phenomenon and the burden of the debt cycle, the destruction caused by violence and armed conflicts that wipe out achievements and engage countries and entire sub-regions into set-back motion, the debilitating impact of HIV/AIDS, all constitute the most visible among the major challenges that impact on African higher education and call for its vigorous role. With globalisation at an intensified pace and its corollary of increased competition and what has been characterised as the knowledge society, African countries need education systems that can provide a solid education and educated people who can competently participate in the production of knowledge not for its own sake but which can be relevant in addressing these challenges and promote broad societal advancement. Globalisation and the Relentless Cycle of the Debt Burden Some of the issues discussed have been incorporated into the other headings in this book. However, these are raised to show how they relate to the debt issue. To the old African problems that call for urgent solutions, new challenges have been added. These problems are compounded by the major factor of globalisation and Africa’s continued vulnerability in the global system. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, some have argued that there is a process of global power restructuring , changing from the former bipolar East-West and the current unipolar world dominated by the United States toward a multipolar system whereby Japan, the European Union, China, and also India would constitute the counter- New Challenges within the Global and Local Objective Conditions 115 forces for a new balance of the world order. In this new restructuring, Asia appears to gain the most momentum. Whether purely speculative or realistic and highly probable, none of the envisaged scenarios has included Africa as a foreseeable regional force to be reckoned with on the world scale. Since Africa lost its world stature at the beginning of the modern global power restructuring that has been shaped by the capitalist and colonial systems in the context of the European expansion since the fifteenth century, it has been caught in the cycle of dependence and external control. It will be realistically difficult, though not impossible, for Africa to be substantively positioning itself as a regional world power, in the near future, within the new restructuring in the framework of natural evolution. The cycle can be broken only if there is a deliberate, vigorous, focussed and consistent action at all levels of African society as a whole. African higher education institutions that form the minds and thus shape critical thinking out of which actions flow, have a daunting role to play in this process given the fact that the global systemic inequality remains firmly in place. Globalisation has been promoted with its corollary of privatisation as the possibility for all nations to thrive in green pastures amidst the rules of one competitive global market. In order for Africa to enhance its stature and position in this global system, solutions from various perspectives have been proposed. Selected aspects of education, especially higher education, that have been addressed within the search for relevant means to empower Africa are briefly discussed . For the purpose of this Green Book, the project of the African CapacityBuilding Initiative (ACBI) can be used to illustrate some of the types of solutions considered and their potential as well as their limitations and contradictions. The main reason for selecting this case is to substantiate the argument that some of the solutions proposed are based on the same premises that created Africa’s marginalisation and are likely to perpetuate it while creating an illusion for the Africans that will delay their realistic assessment of the magnitude of the challenges and their own initiatives in the search for appropriate solutions. In his foreword to The African Capacity Building Initiative: Toward Improved Policy Analysis and Development Management in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank 1991), Edward Jaycox, then the Vice President of the Africa Regional Office of the World Bank, made a statement on the non-existence or weakness of ‘indigenous African capacities - skills, knowledge, and institutions (World Bank 1991:iii). He went on to recall that the...

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