Scant Regard For Scientific Achievement In Namibia

WHILE overseas recently I happened to see in the press that the one million Euro Descartes Prize – as prestigious as the Nobel – had been awarded to a consortium whose physical base is here in Namibia.

The HESS X-ray telescope array just off the Gamsberg road is the only one in the world that looks at the mind-bogglingly high-energy events at the centres of galaxies and since it was opened just four years ago has been immensely productive. I did not expect to find on my return that the country would be celebrating this in the way it did when Frank Fredericks brought home his medal or when Michelle McLean was named Miss Universe.But neither did I expect what I actually found – which was absolutely nothing.No press mention apparently, nothing from Government; nothing even on the HESS page of Unam’s website.To find out about the Namibian HESS team member, Isak David, I had to visit the website of North West University in South Africa.Even the Namibian engineer who built the array did not know.It has always struck me as strange that, despite all the Government Vision 2030 rhetoric, science has never really been taken seriously here, even though the country has, for such a tiny population, an extraordinarily prolific scientific tradition.Centres of excellence like the Geological Survey and the Desert Research Foundation are renowned outside the country and organisations like the Marine Research Laboratory and Namibia Nature Foundation have won leading positions in major international collaborative projects.Despite the fact that we have known for over a decade that school mathematics performance here is the worst in SADC, no credible early year numeracy programme has been developed.I know of no other middle-income country (and indeed few in Africa), where neither mathematics nor science is compulsory to grade 12.And this year, when a Namibian institution wins a major prize for astrophysics, all reference to astronomy has been removed from the new secondary science curriculum.Andrew Clegg Via e-mailI did not expect to find on my return that the country would be celebrating this in the way it did when Frank Fredericks brought home his medal or when Michelle McLean was named Miss Universe.But neither did I expect what I actually found – which was absolutely nothing.No press mention apparently, nothing from Government; nothing even on the HESS page of Unam’s website.To find out about the Namibian HESS team member, Isak David, I had to visit the website of North West University in South Africa.Even the Namibian engineer who built the array did not know.It has always struck me as strange that, despite all the Government Vision 2030 rhetoric, science has never really been taken seriously here, even though the country has, for such a tiny population, an extraordinarily prolific scientific tradition.Centres of excellence like the Geological Survey and the Desert Research Foundation are renowned outside the country and organisations like the Marine Research Laboratory and Namibia Nature Foundation have won leading positions in major international collaborative projects.Despite the fact that we have known for over a decade that school mathematics performance here is the worst in SADC, no credible early year numeracy programme has been developed.I know of no other middle-income country (and indeed few in Africa), where neither mathematics nor science is compulsory to grade 12.And this year, when a Namibian institution wins a major prize for astrophysics, all reference to astronomy has been removed from the new secondary science curriculum.Andrew Clegg Via e-mail