I always wonder how policies are formulated in Ethiopia. Theoretically, different policy options are identified, ranked on their net benefit, and finally a specific policy would be picked based on its conformity with the overall objective of the country. In this process, more often than not, politicians tend to twist policies to support their objective even when doing so is at the expense of the welfare of the society.

In the early 1930s the role of politicians was not an important agenda even in academia. For instance, the famous British economist, John Maynard Keynes, assumed that economic policy should be formulated and implemented by enlightened people drawn from an intellectual aristocracy; hence he believed that policies would always be enacted in the public interest.

Later on, economists such as Michal Kalecki, Akerman and Schumpeter rejected Keynes’ naïve assumption and elaborated how politicians influence policy decisions and outcomes. The most notable influence of politicians is what is referred to as ‘the political business cycle’ where elected politicians are engaged in economic manipulation for political profit. Thus, politicians prefer non-optimal policies to cut the unemployment rate and offer short-term benefits to voters so that they can get re-elected.

We have observed this type of behaviour in Ethiopia during the 2005 election where EPRDF was promising to revoke all traffic violation tickets for taxi drivers, for instance.

By and large, I do not believe that our politicians operate in the way the political business cycle theory predicts. Ruling out this motive of politicians would leave us with Keynes’ believe that policies would be enacted in the public interest so long as the politicians are maximizing the public welfare. Sadly, in the case of Ethiopia, we observe many policies that rather dwarf the public welfare. That is why I wonder how the final policy decisions are made. Either the politicians do not have good advisors who provide them with viable policy options or the politicians make bad judgments consistently. Alternatively, the politicians are not willing to listen to experts’ opinion and hence dictate their policies regardless of the experts’ advice.

Another grim scenario is a case where experts are reluctant to speak their mind for fear of confronting the politicians. My working hypothesis encompasses all of these possibilities though I would not go into details to show which one is the most reasonable. Rather, I want to share my frustration by way of example.

My observation stems from the alarming op-ed note of this newspaper headlined, “Poor Quality is Too High ‘Collateral Damage’ for Ethiopia” [Volume 9 Number 455, January 18, 2009], hence my focus on the government’s education policy.

The government’s expansionary policy on education is perfectly in line with maximizing social welfare. Theories from political economy predict that governments do not educate their people when their interest is to consolidate power. As our government is trying its best in educating as many Ethiopians as possible, I have no doubt on the good faith of the politicians.

However, the current expansionary plan is at best described as a disaster. I would limit myself to the higher educational aspect of the expansion plan to show the downsides of the policy.

In the past years, 13 new universities were opened and for the near future 10 additional universities are planned. The existing higher learning institutions are also required to open new streams and expand their intakes. Annual enrollment in higher education has increased substantially. Focusing on the quantity indicators, the government has done a good job but, for the educational sector quantity can neither be the sole nor the best indicator. Probably, the best indicator is the quality of the graduates coming out of the higher learning institutions.

In his book titled, “The Elusive Quest for Growth”, William Easterly has elaborated that evaluation of the expansionary educational policies shows that poor quality is the main reason, among others, for the failure of the policies in bringing about their desired objective of high economic growth. Unfortunately, it seems that our educational policies disregard the quality aspect of evaluating the success of our educational expansion plan.

Clearly, staffing the 13 new universities is one of the most difficult challenges that the government faces. These universities are either understaffed or staffed with semi-qualified instructors. It is not unusual to witness a fresh graduate with a first degree teaching senior courses that should be taught by experienced instructors with post graduate degrees or doctoral qualifications. The fresh graduates-cum-instructors are open in telling of their experiences, confessing that they had difficult times teaching some of the senior courses that they themselves barely comprehend. To make things worse, some of these instructors were taught by poorly trained staff mainly coming from India.

As such, the newly opened universities are perpetuating mediocrity rather than academic excellence.

In a positive move to address this concern, there is a new initiative to recruit privately-funded postgraduate students. This initiative implicitly assumes that these graduates are well qualified.

Is this assumption justified? I am afraid that the answer is a big ‘no’. In the last few years the government was pushing hard to increase the number of postgraduates. That resulted in the opening of many graduate programmes in many of the existing higher learning institutions, in addition to scaling up enrollment in the existing graduate programmes.

In cases where enrollments were scaled up, the quality of the programmes went down for shortage of qualified professors. Consider that the maximum class size for a professor to closely follow and assess students is 30 students per class. For this class size, the professor can grade the required number of assignments, papers and lab work that guarantee an acceptable level of qualification. Now let’s double the class size to 60 and assign the same professor to manage it. It is physically impossible for a single professor to manage this class size without compromising the quality of his teaching.

That is, if four sets of assignments is the minimum requirement for a certain level of qualification, now that the class size has doubled, the number of assignments will be cut to two, which is below the minimum acceptable standard. Evaluation of the doubling-up scheme in terms of quantity tells a successful story. However, in terms of the quality indicators, it gives a gloomy picture. Rather than producing 30 qualified graduates, the scheme produces 60 graduates who lack the minimum required level of training to do their jobs efficiently.

The above illustration assumes that the professor has the appropriate qualifications and dedication to teach in the graduate programmes. However, due to the low salaries of professors in public higher institutions, many qualified professors are not attracted to teach in these institutions. Many of the professors who are courageous to teach at the low salary are busy chasing consultancy and research projects even to meet their basic subsistence. It is a common phenomenon to witness countless ‘make-up’ graduate classes at the end of the semester as many of the professors are busy to meet their formal schedule due to their other engagements. I am in no position to blame these professors as working for such low salaries is enough sacrifice by itself. The situation in the newly introduced graduate programmes is even more daunting as no qualified professor would be willing to go out of Addis to teach for such low remuneration.  As such, the existing graduate programmes are not producing quality students.

Recruiting the privately-sponsored postgraduates cannot be a panacea for filling the staff requirement of the new universities. It is naïve to expect the production of qualified graduates without qualified instructors.

Another important determinant of quality is adequate supply of educational requirements such as books, computers and laboratory equipment. These are undersupplied in many of the public higher learning institutions. Queue for books and internet services in many of the public university libraries are not unusual scenes. This problem is exacerbated by the advent of the scaling-up of enrollment in the existing higher learning institutions.

Take, for instance, the case of the technology faculty at the Addis Abeba University (AAU). It is currently contemplating, with the Ministry of Education (MoE), to increase its intake significantly in exchange for securing its independence from the AAU. Accordingly, it is preparing to enroll 3,000 students of which the civil engineering stream is supposed to absorb 1,000.

The civil engineering laboratory can only accommodate 20 students at a time; thus a single laboratory exercise will require 50 sessions. This is almost impossible to handle without significant scaling down of the number of laboratory exercises given the existing physical and human resources. It is not hard to imagine the product of such training.

A few weeks ago, frustrating news of increasing enrollment in the medical faculties to 4,000 in three years, came from the Ministry of Health (MoH). For me, this is a public health disaster. Given that the country does not have the capacity to produce such a massive number of qualified medical doctors, in few years we will end up with thousands of mediocre medical doctors and thousands of disastrous cases arising from the responsibility they will assume with their poor training.

Why are the politicians obsessed with the number of graduates rather than their quality? Is that because they do not care about quality?

Our politicians are aware of the importance of quality. A very good example is Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s speech as reported by this newspaper some time ago. It reads: “Increasing quality and assuring quality of graduates at the same time would not be so difficult a job, but only if teaching methods at higher education institutes were radically changed. He (Meles) advised that enhanced curriculum development techniques and the use of information communication technology could help ensure the desired goal”.

One conjecture can be that expanding quantity is easier than guaranteeing quality. It seems that the politicians are capitalizing on their success in increasing enrollment to get more foreign financing. Given that foreign funding is a critical component in the Ethiopian economy as net aid accounted 12.8pc of GDP in 2006, it is difficult to rule out politician’s incentive to come up with promising enrollment indicators even at the cost of quality deterioration.

Another possible explanation is in line with the theory of corruption and public spending. Corrupted politicians tend to prefer capital expenditure (as opposed to recurrent expenditure) for its ease of being misappropriated.

“Corrupted government officials would rebuff all efforts by the public sector workforce to secure wage increases and allied benefits due to parochially partisan vampiristic interests which would not wish to see the relatively large windfall rent compromised or sacrificed,” Khalil Timamy says, in the Review of African Political Economy journal, published in 2005. “Acquiescence to wage increases would run contrary to the dynamic logic of vampirism. If these increases in public sector wages are conceded, then the vampiristic leaders could perhaps still capture the large extractive rents if they agree to allocate a proportion of the budgeted development expenditure to meet the wage demands. But, to do so would be tantamount to losing extractive rents from ‘real’ planned development investments (‘real’ being a notional and often excessive value) expected to be drawn by the elites’ front companies. (Corrupted) leaders would not be willing to ‘make such financial sacrifices’ in this zero-sum game. They would rather line their pockets from budgetary resources earmarked for development investments in road, bridges, and other engineering projects.”

Can this be a valid explanation in the case of Ethiopia where the public sector is characterized by low wages and high capital expenditure?

I am afraid that this trend will continue in the future unless our politicians come to their senses and put the public welfare first. Otherwise, the country will end up with massive debt - both internal and external in financing the huge expansion plan - and unproductive investment. With ‘business as usual’, we are only perpetuating our poverty and underdevelopment. As citizens of this country, we should say, “Enough!” when the government is busy engaged in the unproductive investment.