Olatunji Ololade
THE true patriot, like the Delphic oracle, is maddened by vapours. His dissent is incensed by fertile consciousness; having experienced the towering injustice of the raptorial ruling class, he decides to rebel.
His rebellion, however, is neither funded nor fathered; like an androgynous earth mother, it self-fertilises without help from society’s captors and oppressors: the corrupt presidency, venal governors, legislators, and international NGOs with a bleeding heart. He understands that they are all spawns of the same ogress womb, carnivores of the same badlands.
But society and peers, like their captors cum oppressors, consider him victim of an errant demon. “Is he the only one? Must he rebel at all times?” they drone as he subjects all to the unforgiving spokes of his blindsight. Neither society nor its oppressors appreciate being de-robed or called out, he would learn.
Like the unappreciated hero, the true patriot is eventually abandoned. An outcast, he is constantly assaulted and stigmatised for lacking modern society’s essential traits of being: narrow-mindedness, base sentimentality, and a hankering to traverse gloomy straits. Then he must nurture a taste for funded outrage, lust for sullied money, and expedient passivity.
The true patriot is absent in Nigeria because the nation thrives on inertia. Submissiveness, bred by a culture of illusion, is exploited by demagogues, who present themselves as saviours to a grovelling citizenry.
Demagogues promise glory without sweat, success without sudor, and get significant segments of the citizenry, mostly youth, hung up on the fantasy of a world without hardship.
Eventually, the youth discover that they had been conned. High-strung and embittered over the immateriality of their much-coveted Eden, they become suicidal and apathetic.
Such jadedness becomes a powerful element in ushering society’s submission to tyranny. It rids democracy of vibrancy, leaving it beleaguered. It afflicts a nation with spiritless youth.
Where the youth participate actively, they are unperturbed by pressing social concerns. Where they exhibit concern, they display scripted outrage. Their lack of political literacy makes them susceptible to a pitiful range of diversions, like demagoguery and platitudinous chant.
Wolin would call them victims of imperial politics but I would call them unbidden offering on an altar of vultures. A spectre haunts Nigeria’s youths. Having entered an unholy alliance with the rapacious ruling class, they do not constitute formidable opposition to scare corrupt leadership aright.
Negative emasculated passivity flourishes when the youth subordinate themselves, unquestioningly, to the ruling class. Playing passive requires extreme sacrifice; the docile youth, in fulfilling his role as gelded, amoral being, must silence his mind.
His predicament worsens by the government’s willful perversion of pedagogy. Where education festers as an affliction, scholarship and enlightenment become empty phrases, foisting on Nigeria, an illiterate, passive youth.
Through the depths of his affliction, however, the Nigerian youth is efficiently managed by his oppressors. The corporate hierarchy that holds government and the citizenry hostage, effectively manages the youth by keeping him ignorant and manipulable, via donations to youth-driven NGOs with cosmetic purposes, for instance.
The government equally does its part in keeping the youth docile and deployable towards selfish ends. How? By destroying Nigeria’s educational foundation as well as the possibility of its rebirth.
A foundering educational system accentuates ignorance and apathy, particularly among the youth, whose inherited task includes the fosterage and sustenance of democratic consciousness for national rebirth.
An educated mind is a questioning mind, which conflicts with the whims of Nigeria’s oppressors. Public officers, irrespective of party affiliation, would rather see the citizenry stew in ignorance than enjoy quality education and attain true enlightenment, lest they begin to pulse with discontent over the status quo.
Aspects of government policies and spending render the average youth poorly educated. This year’s education allocation, like previous years’ may not enjoy a rare boost beyond seven percent of the national budget. Not with the COVID-19 crisis.
President Muhammadu Buhari allocated a paltry 6.7% of his initial N10.33 trillion national budget to the education sector, lower than the 20 percent recommended by UNESCO as education budget for developing countries.
Nigeria deserves, at least, an 18 per cent allocation to the education sector. This, President Buhari, must acknowledge in future allocations to the sector. He should make the best use of his second term, and scorn the ‘highly informed, expert opinions’ that counsel an ‘expedient’ and ‘radical’ recourse to the policies foisted on us when ‘structural adjustment’ forced Nigeria to reduce spending on education, health, and infrastructure, among others.
There is no way a team of government apologists comprising ex-journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and party loyalists can effectively spin a precarious education budget. No degree of righteous umbrage and frosted psycho-babble could manage public dissent and discomfiture arising from such ill-advised spending.
The bankruptcy of Nigeria’s economic and political systems are attributable to her comatose education sector, and an elite given free rein to organise education and society around “predetermined answers to predetermined questions.”
The current system has been effectively rigged to produce what many corporate hierarchies persistently cite as “unemployable graduates.” The few “employable” ones are mostly scions of Nigeria’s leadership, and they are recruited from Ivy League and mushroom universities abroad, where they have been schooled only to fulfill responsibilities and find solutions that will preserve the status quo.
They are incapable of asking the broad, universal questions – staples of a deeply grounded, socially conscious educational process. Both “employable” and “unemployable” graduates were never equipped to challenge the superficial and deepest assumptions of Nigeria’s decadent economic and political culture.
They can neither discern nor convincingly evaluate, superficial aspects of popular culture vis-a-vis the harsh realities of political and economic mismanagement.
They are ignorant because they had never been taught to condemn and scorn human nature’s propensity for moral grayness, when confronted with a choice between good and evil.
Lacking a contemplative spirit, they do not understand why Socrates identified all virtues as forms of knowledge and why such knowledge may foster privileged civilisation.
To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs or PriceWater HouseCoopers, argues Hedges, “is to educate him or her in skill. To train them to debate experiential, systemic, and humanist ways of grappling with reality, however, is to educate them in values and morals.”
Indeed, a culture that mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the true measure of a civilisation is its compassion, not its speed at conquest and consumption, spiritedly condemns itself to death.
In true Hedges-speak, humaneness is the product of enlightenment, a comprehensive, adequately funded, and supervised educational process, but Nigeria’s leadership is ignorant of such civilisation. It is a product of society’s moral void.
Blinded by greed and bigotries, they neglect the gaping inadequacies of the country’s educational policies and spending, to service enduring, institutionalised corruption, like outrageous executive, legislative and judicial salaries.
Buhari could yet midwife a constructive civilisation by treading the path less taken. An 18 per cent budgetary allocation, or thereabouts, to the education sector, followed by eagle-eyed monitoring of “projects,” could trigger Nigeria’s renascence, come 2021.
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