Power, Politics, and Higher Education in Southern Africa: Interna ...

The adoption and implementation of the programs of these international organizations were generally met with strong reactions expressed mostly in the form of rejections by significant sub-groups of educational stakeholders, particularly the teaching staff and students.While in these programs, African higher education was treated as a costly and unproductive sub-sector that had to receive a decreasing share of the public funds; figuratively or literally, this sub-sector was rediscovered at the turn of the century and was declared critical for socio-economic development as articulated in the UNESCO/World Bank joint report,Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise, that was published in 2000. Nevertheless, in spite of the use of euphemisms such as reforms and innovations, in essence the power dynamics that SAPs have reflected earlier have endured through this first decade of the twenty-first century.

In Power, Politics and Higher Education in Southern Africa,Dr. Cossa articulates compelling arguments that, either directly and/or through global regimes, the objectives of colonial system and its global structures that produce skewed power in African spaces of official sovereignty in the definition of domestic xiv Foreword policies still prevails. These structures act effectively as global proxies of the same colonial and imperial powers, which generated the SAPs, have endured and produced agencies and structures such as the WTO and GATS. The “agreements” of these regimes have direct impact on the immediate and future state of the African higher education subjected to a new formal integration into the global system.