He says the abolition of teacher training institutions and the conversion of the Polytechnic of Namibia into the fully fledged Namibia University of Science and Technology (Nust) involved ill-advised decisions.
This comes as stakeholders in the education sector are currently convening for a four-day national conference on education.
Speaking to Desert Radio yesterday, Angula said the current education system is failing to produce employable graduates as the structure of the economy currently does not have a high demand for labour.
“The structure of our economy is such that it tends to use capital equipment and not labour,” he said.
Angula said stakeholders have to consider how the education system can provide opportunities to graduates, keeping in mind economic demands.
“The real culprit in this is the structure of our extracting economy,” he said.
Angula said many mistakes have been made along the way, with each new education minister attempting to reinvent the wheel.
One such mistake, he said, was the conversion of the Polytechnic of Namibia.
“I was not in favour of the polytechnic becoming a university of technology, and up to this point, the technology they're talking about we do not see.
“I believe in the diversity of offerings in terms of education so we can capture different types of endowment as far as the students are concerned so that you open up opportunities,” he said.
Angula said while university education is important, it can only have an impact if the involved qualifications are absorbed into the labour force.
“Now you keep a highly skilled person there, and when this person goes to the labour market those high skills are not needed, and you don't have research labs to enable that person to produce new knowledge,” he said.
'IDENTIFY SPECIFIC CHALLENGES'
The second national conference on education is aimed at building on the key recommendations of the 2011 conference.
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