The illusion of progress becomes a bane to development, where a nation’s leadership, pawns her sovereignty for hefty tokens from the industrial complex.
Where such malady subsists, the government becomes lackey to big business and provides little more than technical expertise for corporations and business elites bereft of ethics and a concept of the common good.
The government, beholden to corporate hegemony, preaches resilience to the average Nigerian. To be resilient, however, is to be pliable, docile, exploitable.
Resilience is touted as the core value of Nigerian culture hence the term, “suffering and smiling,” to which millions of Nigerians earnestly subscribe to.
The highest form of patriotism is presumably attained where dissent is smothered by the racket of “national progress.” All we need is the right attitude, the willingness to be politically-correct.
Political campaigns of national rebirth are built around this idea of subjugating the self to national interest. This involves the creation and amplification of slogan over substance, E.g. “Good People, Great Nation,” and material over mind, as reflective in the country’s “cash for vote” culture.
Sloganeering thus attains the depth of a religious revival; chants are composed to trigger sentiments. The political and business elites and agents obligated to them, assist them in preying on the populace; journalists, advocacy gurus and civil societies, among others play muscle in this moral and emotional carnage.
For instance, a fawning press highlights the political class’ pillaging of public treasury as beneficial investment relations and courting of foreign investors. Hence the photosplash of grinning, esurient governors signing bilateral trade agreements with foreign investors.
The most crucial details are often left out of the reportage: like the fact that most of those agreements are legitimised ponzi schemes, geared to fleece unsuspecting states and citizenry of Nigeria’s collective wealth.
Despite her vast oil riches and promise of economic growth, Nigeria has failed to lift her people out of extreme poverty over the past three decades. The World Bank’s 2017 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals, revealed that 35 million more Nigerians were living in extreme poverty (living on less than $1.90 a day) in 2013 than in 1990.
While the World Bank and sister organisations are oft criticised for releasing damning ‘reports’ and ‘revelations’ borne of malicious intent, its recent SDG report is worth contemplation at the backdrop of Nigerian leadership’s frenetic plundering of the nation’s wealth for a privileged few.
A recent revelation served up another reminder of how much malfeasance costs the country. Emails leaked by anti-corruption charities, Global Witness and Finance Uncovered, suggested that a $1.3 billion payment by two multinationaloil corporations in 2011 for a lucrative but undeveloped Nigerian oilfield, never went to the public trust for which it was intended. Instead, almost all of the money, nearly half of that year’s national education budget, was divvied up as kickbacks between high-ranking government officials, notes Yomi Kazeem.
Such flagrant abuse of public office is possible where the citizenry are apathetic to governance issues and ingratiated by an institutionalised culture of corruption.
There is no gainsaying Nigeria suffers the lack of a humane culture and progressive educational system.
Matthew Arnold’s 1869 treatise, Culture and Anarchy, holds that a broad knowledge of culture, “the best that has been thought and said,” would provide standards to resist the errors and corruptions of contemporary life and ask the broad moral and social questions.
Sadly, most universities have become high-priced status enhancers and occupational training centers. As Donoghue writes, prestige is the paramount commodity. Hence the obsession with Ivy League schools’ certificates, and First Class degrees.
The latter should be seen as mere appendages, offering leverage by which the graduate or individual could assert his worth or value to his immediate and larger society.
Where the individual is found wanting in morality, professional and personal ethics, he becomes retrograde to the rebuilding process. Where he is considered amenable or subservient to national goals, an illusion of progress is fostered and celebrated. The truth, however, is that such individual accepts tyranny of the political party and leadership in power.
In Nigeria, party vanities and public officers’ selfish whims are perennially disguised as ‘national interest’ and are aggressively pursued by a misappropriation of national resources.
Whatever the devastation wrought on the state and the populace, in their pursuit of such selfish interests, politicians and the party in power expect the citizenry to maintain a stiff upper lip. They are expected to buy into the fantasy of progress, promised at the end of the pillage.
The Nigerian crisis is a human crisis. The foundation for progress is non-existent in the country because the human elements that should construct such eonian monument are inherently corrupt.
Consequently, we have a ruling class that is essentially, degenerate, predatory in nature, and a working class that religiously fulfills the role of a docile, self-flagellating lower brute.
A recourse to educational foundations, in the light of Arnold’s 1869 treatise, would Nigeria’s interest, given that herformal and informal education process is theoreticallyand practically defective.
Western scholarship, religious education and ethics have been so corrupted, that, they evolve like communicable diseases – neutering culture and claiming lives, for the sake of a few relative truths, idiosyncrasies and currency.
The enlightenment we flaunt is basically a ghost of human education. Under its foul stench, we fight a lost battle for survival against politicised corruption, social strife and entrepreneurial selfishness.
Nigeria regresses by lack of honest and broadly cultured men. Patience, humility, integrity, honesty, good breeding and taste spring from proper learning and culture.
It’s about time we engaged in pursuit and dissemination of knowledge devoid of loose and careless logic. The final product of our educational system must be neither a medical doctor, nor journalist but a learned and humane patriot.
To produce such men and women, our learning process must be borne of pure, practicable ideals and broad, inspiring ends of living. Not desperate, sordid, money-grabbing sound bites.
True knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress. It is never simply to teach breadwinning, furnish teachers for the public schools or vocation for the unemployed. It should above all, bean appendage of that fine adjustment between what Du Bois calls reality and the growing knowledge of life. An improvement of civilisation and solution to its seemingly intractable problems.
Thus the end product of our educational process must have learned to work for the glory of his or her calling, not simply for pecuniary gains. The intellectual must think for truth and progress, not for fame or the applause of the gallery.
This is attainable by conscious endeavour. President Muhammadu Buhari could start by laying the foundation for such a monument. He should improve Nigeria’s education budget beyond the disgraceful 7% fraction as allocated in the last two years.
Then he could supervise the founding and redesignation of the primary school for the secondary, and the comprehensive high school for the polytechnic, university and teacher training colleges.
If we could successfully weave such a progressive and connected process, we could establish an educational system and not a distortion of it.
More significantly, we could establish the Nigeria of our dreams, where the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the humane, enlightened and true.
Leave a Reply