Swazi PM misleads on education standards

”Prime Minister Dr Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini says the outstanding performance by the Swazi team in the World Schools Debate Championships (WSDC) shows that the country’s education standard ranks high in the world,” the Swazi government writes on its official website.

The WSDC is an annual debating tournament for high school-level teams representing different English-speaking countries. Swaziland finished runners up to Australia this year in what was the “biggest upset in the world debate circles” according to Waterford Kamhlaba United World College, the college that the Swazi debating team attend.

According to Waterford Kamhlaba United World College, “Swaziland debating can continue to grow to new heights and be able to continue to inspire other people, especially those in the rural parts of Swaziland, to join debating.”

Director of Education in Swaziland praises fraudulent claims of Swazi educational excellence

Director of Education in Swaziland, Sibongile Dlamini, warned readers of the Times of Swaziland on Friday that writers “need to be careful of plagiarism and fraudulent publication.” She then went on to claim, without any apparent hint of irony, that she was pleased to read an article in the Times of Swaziland praising the country’s education system as one of the best in the world. “It was surprising because over the years, we have had people criticising the education system, saying it was deteriorating.”

Swaziland is ranked 140th in the world according to the UNDP HDI Education Index and according to a Working Paper from the World Bank called The Education System in Swaziland, “key weaknesses pertain to low access uneven and inequitable quality, acute inequalities, resource inefficiency, poor relevance and weak strategic direction and delivery capacity.”

Multidimensional development

The interrelation or interdependence of the various areas that make up any development strategy is increasingly important, also bearing the cultural or psychological aspects of development and the partnership ideal in mind.

That the focus in the development world as a whole has widened somewhat in recent years, from a rather narrow and one-dimensional focus that saw economic and financial remedies as sufficient, to one that more willingly includes other areas such as culture and identity, is here apparent. This is so, although the overall focus is still largely upon economic remedies. Such one-dimensionality pre-supposes that all human beings behave in more or less the same way, something that seems unlikely in all but the most fundamental matters.