One of the achievements of the military government back in the 1970s and 1980s was the launching of what was then known as the Adult Literacy Program under which hundreds of thousands of illiterate people were enabled to read and write and perform simple arithmetical operations that could make their daily lives a little bit easier. In fact the literacy program was not the brainchild of the military regime. It started back in 1976 during the Development through Cooperation Campaign or the Zamacha as it was popularly known then. It started in the deep rural areas where the fight for land to the tiller was in full swing.
Unfortunately both the literacy campaign and the land issue remained promises unfulfilled as the military quickly turned from a Robin wood-style benefactor to a Satanic monster and the presumed beneficiaries either perished in wars or slipped back to darkness. The Achilles Heels of the literacy program at that time was that it started as a kind of «reading and writing for their own sake». Reading and writing were rightly conceived as tools of knowledge and enlightenment on the assumption that «an illiterate population could not build a socialist society».
Realistically speaking, people did not need to be literate to understand the basic tenets of socialism or what the ideology was all about. The state media and more particularly the electronics media, were pouring out socialist propaganda almost 24 hours a day and the people had to sit back and listen to those interminable exhortations and socialist buzz words in order to «raise their consciousness» as it was fashionable in those tragic days. No doubt that many people became literate in the process although these skills did not go far enough to change their lives to the better.
Old women in their 70s and 80s were hailed as heroines and given the certificate of literacy they proudly hang on the walls of their mud houses. One of the satirical comments of the time went as far as saying that those certificate of literacy were carried aloft on the days the old women said goodbye to life, along with their oversize photographs mourners brandished at their funerals. When the illfate socialist project went wrong, even the smallest display of pride became the target of public ridicule. And literacy was buried along with its most heroic practitioners, namely the heroes and heroines of mass education.
Then came the concept of «functional literacy» and replaced the notion of reading and writing for their own sakes. As you cannot practice art for art’s sake, there was no rationale in learning the alphabets simply for the sake of reading. Functional literacy supposed that literacy should be functional, that is to say, it has to fulfill some practical purpose as it should be directly relevant to the careers or productive lives of the practitioners. To give you a simple example, under functional literacy, farmers are supposed to read materials related to farming and try to improve their farming techniques and productivity.
This project too was quickly abandoned as there was no time, resources or appetite to carry it through. The entire project collapsed as the military regime exited from power living behind it one or two positive legacies, the first being the land proclamation that is still controversial and the other was the adult literacy program although it died in its crib, had massive popular support. Enter the EPRDF in 1991 and priorities changed. Everything the military regime did was scrapped and replaced by old wines in new bottles. Literacy was nowhere to be mentioned and what mattered most under the new authorities was one’s ethnic identity and not whether one had the skills to read and write.
The new infatuation with ethnic identity was so relentless that Amharic was abandoned as a medium of learning to be replaced by dozens of regional languages and if at all people wanted to learn how to read and write they were advised to do so in their respective languages. Whatever the medium of instruction, literacy program was completely abandoned.
The generation that grew up under the EPRDF did not know what that program meant and the level of literacy dropped dramatically in the following years. Rapid population growth made the situation more difficult as newly illiterate people came to the scene in their millions and nothing was done to teach them the basic skills of reading and writing. Many literate people slipped back to illiteracy as they were abandoned in the middle of the road and there was no one to help them at least maintain the skills they acquired under the previous administration.
Together with this the reading habit and culture of the people plummeted and fewer books were sold in the book markets. In the following years, the national debated shifted towards the so-called quality of formal education while informal learning was completely abandoned. Add to this the advent of new media and communication technologies, and the circle is completed. Neither the government nor private institutions tried to revive the dream of educating the masses through adult literacy programs. What was so much enthusiasm among the young and the public was buried without a whisper.
Ethiopia now ranks among the last countries in adult literacy development in the world. We have now more than 100 million people according to official statistics. but how many of them are illiterate is something we rarely ask or hear because deep down we know it is a shame to be unable to make at least the majority of the people literate instead of bragging about the number of universities we have built for spreading an educational system which is considered by many scholars as dysfunctional.
The situation has increasingly become difficult. How can you teach million of hungry people how to read and write when their immediate need is to get food and save their lives? How can you convince illiterate people to learn new skills to change their lives for the better when hundreds of thousands of degree holding youth are roaming the streets of big town in search of jobs?
How can you ask the new generation of youngsters to read books while their wildest dreams have become to own a Kindle, a smart phone or an Apple tablet? These are the million dollar questions for which no one seems to have answers to at least for now. What we know for sure is that a reading culture that was dangling on the ropes for the last many decades is now in free fall.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition May 26/2019
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
