In many African villages and cities, there is a group of youth (and sometimes adults) that do extra ordinary things without any formal education. There are many cases where an ordinary villager has been called upon to repair a car whose problems engineers had failed to diagnose.
You must have heard about a young Kenyan man who assembled primitive car engines and iron sheets to make an amateur aircraft. He actually flew a little and crash landed.The then government of Kenya did not support it and instead declared his invention a threat to others.
There are also many cases where those who have never passed any formal exams have designed cheaper tools to enable villagers perform tasks more efficiently. Recently, a Kenyan high school failure made lamps that light up for 60 days from old dry cells and plastic tins. He mixes crushed dry cells with select sand particles. The traders along Kakamega road (Western Kenya) prefer them to kerosene lamps which are not only expensive, but easily catch fire.
Then there are cases of young people or adults who just can’t fit in a classroom setting.They seem a nuisance to their parents, peers and the general community BUT you can see that there is something really unique in them. The kind of talent they possess would make you wonder why they can’t just fit well with others. In many cases most people think they are mad or bewitched and are usually forced into prayers that lead to nothing. As a matter of fact these gifted people end up in drugs, alcohol, etc
But this talent is not limited only to young people. There is a man who dropped out of school in Primary Level 5 due to lack of school fees. He traveled to visit his aunt and became a tea boy in a clearing and forwarding company in Mombasa. He quickly learnt how the business operated and impressed the boss in 6 months to be made a supervisor. He later rose to become a manager before quitting and starting his own clearing and forwarding company which is one of the largest in Africa today. He employs graduates most of whom seek academic attachments in his organization. But when he wishes to join their universities, they tell him he is not qualified.
There are many others that include girls who dropped out of school due to pregnancies and stigmatized as young mothers by being told they cannot rejoin mainstream education as they would influence others in school to become pregnant. Such girls who get rare chances usually exceed expectations as the pregnancy has no correlation with innate talent (Coleman, 2007).
These groups of people have special abilities known as gifts or talents. Their “Creation Wiring” differs from most of us and whenever they learn something they try to see it work in 100 different ways and in 100 years to come. These are the people that would finally shape our political, social and economic destiny, yet we think for them with academics or force them into the same.
However, our education systems are designed for those who are “bright” but may not be “gifted”. As a matter of fact, bright people “know the answers” but gifted ones “ask questions”. In such a set up the gifted ones often fail formal examinations and the bright ones pass after rigorous cramming or memorizing of tutors notes.
Thus those gifted or talented but did not meet the threshold of grades required are often left out of university education and usually disillusioned about education.
The saddest situation in Africa is that these “frustrated gifted” persons end up being drunkards of illicit brews in the villages. Some become hard core criminals or even wasted in drugs. It is for this reason that despite the great talents from Africa we still grapple with negative and retrogressive approaches towards socio-economic development hence the poor state of our economies.
Education should thus have a quick paradigm shift if it were to help address these problems and such education should be merely embedded in acquisition of papers but in real world knowledge and skills that is measurable. Such education should be in real gifts and talents so that it can inspire creativity and innovation.
