MABINDA: Scientists and engineers should also contest for elective positions

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a call for our great scientists and engineers to get out of their research labs or their design studios, but rather that if scientists and engineers want policy favourable to their profession, and the country in general, they must try to vie for leadership positions.

Of course, there is no one path to leadership; we have leaders from all sorts of backgrounds, and they do quite well representing their professions. However, when you think of STEM disciplines, they are underrepresented in leadership. This is not like law, where the natural progression is to join politics.

We have had some engineers who have fared very well in politics. For instance, Raila Odinga was a mechanical engineer. And his background in mechanical engineering likely contributed to his prowess in leadership. Engineering is about solving problems in a practical manner, and isn’t that what leadership is about?

In fact, we should tone down the engineering curriculum a bit so that we infuse it with the liberal arts, so that we acknowledge that the engineering profession is only as good as the society in which it is practised.

Teachers and lawyers do well in politics because they deal with people one on one. A teacher lives within society and so knows the problems that people face, whilst an engineer is in a factory and only interacts with machines.

What if there were distribution requirements requiring that, before an engineering student graduates, they must take some humanities and social sciences units to enable them to become leaders in their own right?

Harvard introduced a new engineering degree programme known as renaissance engineering, which was supposed to be an intersection between engineering and the social sciences. However, the programme did not go far owing to funding inadequacies.

The leadership challenges this country and, frankly, Africa faces are enormous. It requires scientists and engineers who will use their training to solve our deepest challenges. Think, for instance, of the lack of value addition of our minerals.

How is it that the mineral worth potential of DR Congo is $30 trillion, and yet the country is one of the poorest in the world? How is it that every mobile phone and computer in the world uses coltan from DR Congo, and yet there is not a single mobile phone factory in DR Congo? Won’t engineers who are also leaders be able to navigate such resource challenges in Africa?

One reason China is growing in the double digits and on the verge of overtaking the United States economically is that it is led by engineers, whereas America is led by lawyers. That fosters faster decision-making on the part of the leaders, and that’s why China is the leader in such fields as AI and semiconductor chips.

Didn’t DeepSeek of China outdo ChatGPT? China makes 100-year plans, while its nemesis, the United States, makes four-year cycle decisions, hence the bureaucracy in America. We were led by an economist, Mwai Kibaki, and you saw how Kibaki moved with speed to re-engineer the Kenyan economy and move it on a trajectory of prosperity. Economics has moved so much towards being a hard, exact science like physics, so we could argue that Kibaki was a scientist.

Of course, there is the whole debate on whether leaders are born or made. That is, some believe that no matter how much training on leadership principles you give someone, if they were not born to be a leader, they will amount to nought, even with a PhD in leadership.

The argument put forward by this is that African leaders went to the Harvards, Yales, and Oxfords of this world, and yet, while Euro-American and Asian students went to develop their countries, didn’t Africans with these fancy degrees come home and destroy their countries?

Didn’t Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe have seven degrees to boot, yet oversaw the destruction of his country, never mind the sanctions that befell his country as a result of appropriating land from whites with no compensation?

It’s good that even as we train our scientists and engineers, we balance it with social sciences and humanities so they can be future leaders. You’d rather have an engineering curriculum that’s toned down and infused with society and leadership than have a hard, technical curriculum that produces technical geniuses but overall misfits.

Author of 'The 1% Continent: How Africa can rise up'