Changing The Game

Wits student Kamal Ramburuth-Hurt is driving a campaign to revolutionise the ‘irrelevant’ economics curriculum taught at South African universities. It’s called Rethinking Economics for Africa (Refa) – and it’s gaining traction.

- Sue Segar

WITS POLITICS AND ECONOMICS student Kamal Ramburuth-Hurt, 22, came to the realisation that “something wasn’t right” while he was sitting in an economics lecture on how the labour market worked. “We were learning about bargaining power, unions and budget constraints but the neoclassical model we were being taught just didn’t make sense.”

It was 2016 and Ramburuth-Hurt was in the second year of his degree. He pointed out to the course coordinator that the labour market she was talking about was “not the one we live in”. He questioned why students were learning about a labour market model that did not apply in South Africa. And he complained of inconsistencies: on top of the use of microeconomic principles on a macroeconomic problem, recent research on implementing the national minimum wage (this was before the minimum-wage findings were made public) had concluded that it would not result in widespread unemployment as the textbooks had taught. Those findings conclusively proved that what we are learning does not make sense in countries like ours.”

The lecturer had agreed with him, explaining: “…but unfortunately we have to teach these models because these are the models used at the universities in the UK and the US. What if some of you end up at Oxford or a university in Europe? If you don’t learn this way, you won’t know this classical stuff and you’ll be behind.”

That comment made RamburuthHurt realise that students were “not learning things relevant to our lived experiences” but simply because it is learned in the West. He decided their economics curriculum needed to be decolonised.

“Most students do not go overseas after their degree or even after their honours. Most remain in South Africa or other African countries, having been taught a labour-market model that does not apply to their countries.”