Pan African High Level Conference on Education (PACE)
News:
Education ministers and senior country representatives from Africa’s 54 States met in Nairobi for the Pan African High Level Conference on Education (PACE) for three days from 25 – 27 April 2018. The aim of the conference was to evaluate the implementation progress of internationally and regionally agreed targets on education. The targets of the conference included the Sustainable Development Goal on Education (SDG4) and the Continental Strategy for Education (CESA) in Africa 2016-2025. [The Star Newspaper]
Comments:
Africa as a continent was colonized physical before and briefly after WWII and to date remains colonized indirectly via colonial agent rulers who implement colonial agenda on their respective colonial masters. Western colonialism was not content with pillaging human and material resources to sustain and consolidate its power over its colonies; it had to destroy the indigenous cultures and values (religion, language, dressing codes, etc) and supplant them with distorted and totally ambivalent versions which to date keeps mutating from one step to another in terms of policy modifications. As a result of colonization, the colonialists implemented their own form of education founded upon secularism within their colonies. Colonial governments realized that they gained strength over colonies not only through physical control but also mental control. This mental control was carried out through education. The colonizers’ educational goal was to expose Africans to a western superior culture. Colonizers thought education would bring Africans into the modern world or modern age and education would bring them to a higher level of civilization. However, the need for skilled native labor by colonizers for economic development and eagerness to propagate Christianity made colonizers to use education as a tool to achieve social control over African people.
Throughout the last four and a half centuries, the superior culture of racism and white supremacy have continually threatened the existence of African people before, during, and after colonial enslavement. These threats have forced Africans to modify their beliefs, thoughts, behavior in order to survive on a planet where they are regarded as “Third World People”. Today colonial agent rulers and their coterie of supporters and opportunists who include scholars and experts versed with western colonial education are to date implementing and furthering the poisonous superior culture founded upon secular capitalist ideology. Secularism called for the separation of state and religion; hence gave the state the power to legislate over life’s affairs contrary to the demands of the Creator. With it emanated dangerous systems and concepts of social liberalism, economic exploitation anchored on interest loans, privatization policies etc., four freedoms (freedom of worship, freedom of ownership, freedom of speech and personal freedom/individualism) and democratic system of governance, nationalism, patriotism etc. across the African continent and beyond.
The consequences of implementing the ‘western superior culture’ are catastrophic not only in Africa but across the world even in the so called ‘First World’ countries. Such that they do not need to be highlighted because they have transcended in day to day life exposed by moral decadence, status-quo elitism, rampant tribalism and racism, shocking levels of unemployment, thievery and pillaging of both private and public resources by predacious capitalists etc.
Africa’s renaissance lies in its replacement of colonial secular capitalism and in turn embrace the Khilafah project. Khilafah State’s education policy is composed of the Shar’ah rules and administrative canons related to education curriculum. The Shar’ah rules related to education emanate from the Islamic creed and they have Shariah evidences such as the subjects of study and separating between male and female stsudents. As for the administrative canons related to education, they are the permitted means and styles which the ruler in authority considers beneficial in implementing the policy and achieving its goals. They are worldly matters susceptible to development and change according to what appears most suitable to implement the Shari’ah rules related to education and the Ummah’s basic needs. Likewise they can be adopted from the experiments, expertise and permitted research of other nations.
This system of Shari’ah rules and administrative canons will requires an alternative apparatus with the competence to achieve the basic objectives of education in the Khilafah State, namely building the Islamic personality. The apparatus will oversees the supervision, organization and accounting all aspects of education with respect to setting the curriculum, selecting qualified teachers, tracking the advancement and progress of students’ learning, and supplying schools, institutes and universities with the required laboratories and necessary educational tools.
Under the Intellectual leadership of the Khilafah implementing Islam ideologically and its systems emanating from it including that of education, Africa will rise to global heights in terms of civilization and vanquish that of its colonial capitalist masters’. The time is now for Africa to liberate itself from the yoke of colonial capitalism that is the root cause of its miseries and shun such Annual Conferences that yield no fruits but entrench colonial stranglehold of it.
Ali Nassoro Ali
Member of the Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Kenya
#ReturnTheKhilafah
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