"A leading East African political scientist, Prof Mahmood Mamdani, who is the director of Makerere University’s Institute of Social Research has put universities in Sub-Saharan Africa in the dock by accusing them of not creating researchers but churning out native informers to national and international non-governmental organisations.
Addressing academics and students recently at Makerere, Mamdani said academic research and higher education in most African universities is controlled and dominated by a corrosive culture of consultancy. “Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity while academic extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels,” said Mamdani.
But whereas some academics might disagree with Mamdani, statistics from the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) indicates all is not well with the African academe, as the entire African continent is home to only 2.3 per cent of world’s researchers. Unesco defines researchers as professionals who are engaged in the conception or creation of new knowledge, products, processes, methods and systems."
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"Africa home to only 2.3 per cent world’s researchers", by Wachira Kigotho, The Standard for Fairness and Justice, 10/08/2011