This paper seeks to comparatively procure prospect in understanding the evolution of language use in the education systems of Kenya, Tanzania and South Sudan using cultural pluralism as an ideological casing and policy change as a theoretical setting. While the transitional and developmental phases in the language policies of Kenya and Tanzania date back to early 1960s through 1980s against the backdrop of colonial domination, South Sudan grapples with the unorthodox task of launching a language policy in 2011 that is both transitional in terms of breaking free from the hegemonic grip of Arabic; and developmental in terms of scrambling to assign value to its home languages and develop them.  It is obvious both Kenya and Tanzania have long embarked on bilingual education driven by Kiswahili and English in an uneasy duality that has stood the test of time. The nature of policy change in their context is path dependence, meaning their current trajectories have been established by the initial conditions of colonial language policy and the conjuncture of their independence era. By contrast, it is the punctuated equilibrium of political separation from Sudan that defines South Sudan’s nature of policy change, rendering it more likely to embrace policy diffusion based on functionality, commonality and diversity. Developing a mother tongue-based multilingual education remains the only viable reasoned use of language that Kenya, Tanzania and South Sudan should foster by atoning for the vices of status planning in their language policies; while using corpus planning to line up systematic provisions for linguistic designations and thus create the missing link between language choice and national poise. That being said, this study remains essentially theoretical and illustrative and would benefit more from additional empirical research.

This paper critically re-examines the narrative of decolonization of education in Africa and questions the extent to which the supposed decolonization processes are sensitive and responsive to new forms of exploitation of Africa as may arise from new centres of global power such as China. Using Archer’s realist social theory, the study notes that African nations still by and large use colonial-era curriculum frameworks, power relations and institutional structures to enact and validate schooling for its human capital formation; suggesting decolonization processes are neither effective nor enduring. African education systems are under-utilizing local climate and culture to promote indigeneity alongside modernity mainly because the element of agency is lost in the shuffle of its elite class’s inability to accumulate meaning over the last six decades. There is need, therefore, to reclaim Africa’s humanity and subjectivity by decolonizing production of knowledge of Africa if decolonization processes are not to become a metaphor. Using Syrotinski’s deconstructive post-colonialism, the study critiques the representation of China in the post-colonial epistemic subtlety of partnerships and argues that China’s influence in Africa is primarily conditioned by the structure and culture of colonization and that China may seek greater elaboration of the same cyclical charade to look both “different and pertinent.” Chinese overtures to Africa literally constitute a contingency that affects the story of Africa’s decolonization and its outcomes by coming with a price tag of exploitation, albeit more muted and less refuted. Prudence dictates that African education systems should provide avenues to question the narrative of China-Africa cooperation from the standpoint of unequal relations that could undermine Africa’s efforts to eliminate dependence and so eventually fully decolonize. African nations need to re-think China and their education systems must provide the standpoints for doing so by widening the social base of political consciousness and action against possible neo-imperial takeover.

This study reviews the decentralisation of education in six West African countries during 1980-2005 using a dual conceptual framework of systems theory of public policy and political bargaining model of management. The study notes that in many respects, decentralisation of education has been more spatial than substantial, essentially moving responsibilities for decision and operation a peg or two down but withholding authorities at the central level. The basic decision making for educational service delivery has been mainly transferred within the same legal entity, signalling the strength of deconcentration as the main mode of decentralisation in West Africa. These countries’ tools and techniques to organise school work and acquire and allocate resources to achieve educational goals are invariably based on the bureaucratic and flexible models of educational administration undergirded by a national governance model that is by and large monocentric and nurtures verticality. Thus, constrained by a political mindset that by tradition prefers physicality to functionality in local government enterprise and undermined by the absence of appropriate knowledge infrastructure for an advanced economy, decentralisation of education in West Africa more often than not stretches back into the past to define confinement rather than inspire refinement. To their credit, Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal have dedicated capital to restructure their education systems and thus fundamentally created the pressure for change by virtue of decentralisation. But unless funds follow functions religiously and central dominance gives way to local prominence generously, the prospects for leveraging the impact of decentralisation on educational flexibility and quality will remain modest at best.