Somali educators: Ineffective role among the social change
Although there has been in Somalia political instability resulted from the civil war that was happening throughout the last two decades, the situation of the country is changing as the government leading by His Excellence Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is directing much needed projects to rebuild the state and regain stability.
Benefiting from the ongoing developmental projects, the education in the country has got its chance to develop after it has been influenced by the political insecurity in the country for last decades. And today, we have thousands of secondary schools and hundreds of universities in Somalia as well as many other educational institutions that are mostly owned by the private individuals. Among those universities, we have only Somali National University as the sole public owned university, which has been reopened recently since the collapse of former Somali military regime in early 1990s.
If we compare the number of Somali students in all educational levels of today to those of the past, we found that the citizens of this country have decided to make numerous changes of their past conflict-based environment. They realized that through the path of education, they can shape their own peaceful and progressive future life.
This new culture of establishing and empowering the education has provided to the Somali people large number of educated people from both undergraduate and post-graduate studies inside the country or from the overseas.
Although we have these positive things in a country like Somalia, which is said to be the most dangerous state in the world in the past years, the role of educators helping the improvement of the social situations in the country is still missing.
According to the opinion of some Somali educators, some reasons that are causing Somali educated people to fail in exposing their potentiality to help the society are as the following:
Tribalism: Somali people have been divided into clans fighting among themselves. They adopted with the culture of tribalism by making it the base of their life objectives. Every clan has its special objectives and targets, which may sometimes came against the objectives of other clans.
The clan leaders are the most powerful influencers on the societies as they are giving the guidance and instructions to everybody who belongs to the clan, among those are educators who belong to the clan.
There is a Somali proverb which says roughly translating “The Cleric or the Sheikh shouldn’t be straight if his clan is not so”. This reflects the clan-based culture that we practice in Somalia, which leaded all educators to obey only the instructions of their clan leaders rather than using their instructive ideas and knowledge that they gained from their education.
The educator thought that they are only responsible for their clans, instead of thinking of the social responsibility and the national issues as a whole. They failed to be ready to revive their country after years of destruction and wars.
Appearing like educated while behaving like ignorant: This is another problem facing the Somali educated people that make their education spoiled and unproductive for the society.
The cause of lacking fruitful actions done by the Somali educators in favor for their surviving society is the habit of appearing like educators while behaving like ignorant. They think that being educated is just like wearing new clothes which gives you esteem and makes you respected by the society. However, they forgot that the education has its special behavior that should be learnt and practiced by the people who are going to be called as educators.
Hence, Somalia needs educated people who know the meaning of education very well in order to change this behavior of using the education as clothes to make better appearance regardless to the behavior of the person who wear these clothes. If we do not get those real educators, our education would be under the control of ignorance.
Written by: Mohamed Abdullahi Abubakar (Dhaley)
Mogadishu-Somalia.