Blaming the fear of the expired degree on our lack of attention to detail

[ad_1]

For weeks, social media and traditional media have been saturated with the debate over degrees that may have expired. But the truth is that no degree has an expiration date, and people whose degrees have been declared expired need not panic. There is absolutely nothing to fear.

This experience should teach us something that many of us in Uganda and Africa in general don’t always take seriously: attention to detail.

In communication, writing clearly and precisely matters a lot. It probably doesn’t matter if you’re in a WhatsApp group of bar patrons where almost everyone casually writes messages or when you’re texting a boyfriend/girlfriend. But in a professional setting, it is important.

You want people to read and understand exactly what you mean, because if the messages are misunderstood, they can lead to unintended, unwanted results and/or catastrophic failures.

This is part of the reason why organizations such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States insist on strong writing skills for many of their recruits. These skills help greatly when it comes to sharing information to act on. Which brings me to the National Council for Higher Education (NHCE).

A seemingly minor but serious mistake made by the organization is the reason why we had an unnecessary debate about expired degrees when in fact no degrees expired. If the NHCE had tried to communicate clearly and accurately, we would never have had this pointless debate.

The NHCE states on its website that one of its core values ​​is professionalism, which is the high standard you expect from someone who is well trained for a particular job. One wonders how an organization that cares about professionalism and employs highly qualified people who deal with higher education fails to tell the difference between expired and under review.

The Minister of State for Higher Education, Mr John Chrysostom Muyingo, has since clarified during his appearance before Parliament that our reference to expired courses only meant that the courses were under review.

There seems to be a lack of attention to detail that is pervasive. You see it in the classroom work prepared by primary and secondary teachers. You see it in public hospitals where the toilets sometimes don’t even have tissues and soap.

Here is a good example from the website of the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) whose mandate is: to provide quality education and sports services in the country, which are constitutional obligations of the state and government of Uganda .

The sentences below (reproduced verbatim) are taken from the profile of the Minister of Education published on the ministry’s website. You can clearly see that whoever wrote the profile knows little about punctuation and doesn’t care about attention to detail.

In February 1981; Janet Museveni and her children Janet Museveni a spinster from Bweranyagye Girls’ Secondary School; holds a bachelor’s degree in education

Outside of politics and being the first lady of Uganda; Janet MuseveniAnd don’t expect to see any errors corrected. Senior ministry officials are too busy to check the website, and maybe even if they did, they wouldn’t see anything wrong. After all, we write as we speak.

This inability to pay attention to detail is probably why we struggle to produce high quality products that can be sold in wealthy countries. If you can’t put a comma in a text or spell Bweranyangi correctly, forget about making a product like an iPhone.

Musaazi Namiti is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk[email protected]

[ad_2]