The Nation Newspaper

Category: Friday

  • Where are the Muslims?

    It may not be strange to say that the similitude of Islam and Muslims is like that of a snail and its shell. They share a common destiny and remain as inseparable as the sun and its beaming light. None can afford to part with the other without dire consequences. Today, as the world’s fastest growing religion, Islam has a population of about 1.7 billion adherents. This means that one in every five human beings on earth is a Muslim. But in concrete terms, where are those Muslims?

    Islam totally personifies the divine legal theory that sustains the magnificent grandeur of the universe. That theory is fully embodied in the Qur’an. Muslims, on the other hand, stand as the agents supposedly showcasing the norms of Islam. Without Islam, there would have been no Muslims. And without Muslims, Islam would have remained a permanent abstraction randomly tapping the imagination of mankind. This brings a vital question to one’s mind: where is their meeting point?

    Long before the Almighty Allah informed the Angels of His intention to create man, Islam had been in existence. And contrary to the misconception of many uninformed elements, Islam (meaning peace) had been in place before the creation of man. It was the harmony that held all the pre-Adam elements together in a perfect co-existence. Without that harmony, the primogenitor of mankind would not have found a peaceful abode in the Garden of Eden. Thus, the unification of peace and man came to promise the continuity of the universe.

    Ironically, however, the world of Islam, especially in contemporary times, has turned a new phase at the instance of its adherents called ‘Muslims’. And with that new phase, the falconer seems to have been estranged by the falcons. Muslims, like the shell of a snail are found everywhere but without Islam. And the latter, as long prophesied by the Messenger of Allah (SAW), is rapidly becoming an orphan.

    Now, Islam is like a snail without its shell. If that great religion is vividly and effectively present in any part of the world today, it is in the West. And that confirms the fact that effective quality rather than idle quantity is what Islam needs to thrive as a divine religion. Muslims in the West are not merely facing a day to day war, they are permanently living on the battle ground. All the raging wars against Islam today, as in the past few centuries, are from the West. And the arsenal used by the West to execute those wars is funded directly or indirectly by Muslim countries.

    There are about 23 Muslim Arab countries mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. These countries together control one fifth of the entire wealth in the world because of the enormous natural resources with which they are endowed. But in their quest for security other than that of Allah, they entrust virtually all their endowed assets to those who are waging war against Allah. More than 90% of the Muslim Arab wealth is invested in the West or kept in Western bank accounts in the name of foreign reserves. A major chunk of those assets is not only used to fight Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, it is also dished out as loan to poor African countries at throat-cutting interest rate in the name of London and Paris Clubs.

    And when those Western oppressors want to manipulate African mentality to their own advantage, they bring to Africa some pittance as grants, foundations and scholarship out of the profit they made from Muslim Arab money kept in their custody. This is to create the impression that they are friends of Africans. Yet, when the beneficiaries of such largess try to show gratitude, they (the oppressors) come out in their true colours by dictating certain terms and conditions which may fetter those beneficiaries to the stake of indebtedness. It should be noticed that Western largess flows to Africa only when military attacks on Muslims in some other parts of the world are raging or about to rage. The largess is a sort of Greek gift with which to gag the innocent Africans and thereby prevent them from joining their brothers and sisters in condemning such attacks. Thus, the Westerners strangely serve as proxy for Muslim Arab philanthropy.

    Today Muslim Arabs are so disunited, disorganised and Islamically disorientated that they cannot even cooperate among themselves to confront a common problem. Rather than jointly solving a common problem, some of them prefer to team up with antagonists to fight their fellow Muslim brothers.

    That is what happened during the Iranian revolution in 1979 when that country was seeking to liberate self from the Western imperialism imposed on her by Shah Pahlavi on behalf of the United States. Rather than cooperating with Iran to rid the region of imperialism, what the neighbouring Iraq did with the support of other Arab countries was to take advantage of the then prevailing situation to attack Iran on behalf of America using the weapons freely supplied her by the latter. The devastating war which ensued from that attack lasted for eight sorrowful years before the aggressor called for peace having realised the impossibility of winning the precipitated war.

    Not long after that, the same Iraq was instigated by America to invade Kuwait as a compensation for her military losses in the war with Iran an incident that caused the 1991 Gulf war which was waged by some American led Western allied forces against Iraq. And, ironically, in that war, Egypt, a fellow Muslim Arab country was found on the side of the European allies that bombarded Iraq and killed Muslim women and children in their thousands. Egypt’s gain in the war was a debt relief from America to the tune of $20 billion.

    For a long time, there was no love lost between Egypt and Libya while Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi held sway as Heads of both countries. The neighbourhood of Algeria and Morocco has for decades been hotter than a battle ground between two sworn enemies. There is also a permanent cold war which began in the 1930s between Saudi Arabia and Yemen which is still ongoing till date. Syria and Iraq continue a diplomatic cat and mouse game as they do not realistically see eye to eye though they are both Arab countries. Iran, the only non-Arab (Persian) country in the Gulf sub-region, is constantly suspicious of her neighbouring Arab countries because the latter have tacitly ostracised her on the basis of racial discrimination and denominational ideology. Yet, they all subscribe to Islam and claim to be Muslim countries.

    In her own bid to imbibe the so-called Western civilisation, Turkey, an Islamic but non-Arab country, has voluntarily enslaved herself to secularism, a notion imposed on her in the 1920s by Mustapha Kamal Ataturk and which became entrenched in the country’s constitution. It must be recalled that Turkey, with her 89% Muslim population was the last seat of Islamic Caliphate which ended in 1924 at the instance of Ataturk. In all these, where are the Muslims?

    Here in Nigeria, the situation is by far worse. Mosques, which Prophet Muhammad (SAW) established as the permanent axis around which all Muslim activities must rotate, have been totally reduced to the level of meeting for Salat alone. Only very few Mosques have the necessary facilities useful for the Ummah. Even bank accounts are not considered necessary as the Imams and members of the Mission Boards of most Mosques act as unofficial treasurers in which capacity they pocket the money collected daily or weekly. Against the Prophet’s prescription, most of our Mosques are without libraries or study rooms where the young ones can take advantage of computer and internet to be thoroughly educated. It does not bother those Imams that only few Muslim youths come to worship in the Mosques. What bothers them is the absence of rich Muslims who can donate remarkable sums of money to the Mosques for them to pocket. Against Islamic prescription, those Imams are the collectors, the distributors and the recipients of Zakah to the detriment of the Ummah. Where are the Muslims?

    In Nigeria today, only a few Muslim schools are good enough to compete with schools established by non-Muslims. Even those few especially in the Southwest, are mostly without Mosques since the motive of establishing them transcends religion. For instance, the very first secondary school in West Africa (Ahmadiyyah College, Agege, Lagos), established in 1948 by Ahmadiyyah Movement in Islam (now Anwarul-Islam Movement of Nigeria) had no Mosque for many decades after its establishment. Yours sincerely was a teacher of Arabic and Islamic Studies in that school for about six years between 1971 and 1976. And all efforts to encourage its founders to provide a Mosque for the students yielded no result. It is doubtful that the school had any Mosque until it celebrated its 60th year anniversary recently. The same is the case with Ansar-ud-Deen College, Isolo, Lagos, which was established in 1954 purportedly for the purpose of giving Muslim pupils Western education with Islamic orientation which those pupils could not get in Christian schools.

    Whereas, the first building to be erected on the site of any Christian school is a chapel where pupils can worship in Christian way, this is not the case with Muslim schools. As a result, most of those pupils have often had cause to regret attending Muslim schools even years after their graduation. If the situation was that bad in the past and there is no plan for the future where are the Muslims?

    Three Universities are known to be the oldest in the world today. The three are situated in the Arab world confirming that the idea of University education got to the West from the Muslims. They are Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco and Zaytuniyyah University in Tunis, Tunisia. All of them, established well over one thousand years ago, started in the Mosques. Yet, they were all preceded by the University of Cordoba which was the very first University established in the world. The objective of starting each of them from the Mosque was to enable students know that whatever knowledge they acquired ought to be used in the service of Allah.

    The Christian West which borrowed from the Muslims the noble idea of using a religious sanctuary as the foundation of a school or a University saw the sense in it and made it the cornerstone of their educational orientation. Thus in Nigeria and elsewhere, no Christian Missionary schools are established without the Church serving as their first buildings.

    What is the objective of the Muslim schools established in Nigeria without Mosques? In Islam, Mosque is not for Salat alone neither is it to be headed by half-educated elements in the name of Imams. It is rather an all-encompassing centre for all aspects of Muslim lives. For Muslims, Mosque is a school, a library, a hospital, a trade centre, a bank, a Parliament and a court of law. To limit the Mosque to prayer alone therefore, as done in Nigeria is a terrible disservice to Islam.

    Muslims who worship regularly in the Mosque must have something to gain economically, socially, politically and perhaps medically besides the rewards accruing to them from observance of Salat. Coming for congregational prayers five times every day without any temporal gain does not help the course of Islam. Islam is about temporal and spiritual lives and not about the latter alone. The Mosque ought to have endowments for widows. It ought to have scholarship programmes for orphans and indigent pupils. It also ought to have empowerment programmes for the jobless. And those employed as Imams and other officials in the Mosque ought to be well treated in terms of remunerations and social welfare if only to avoid corruption and redundancy. But how can all these be provided when the Mosques themselves are erected without any plan for the future?

    On my way back from Hajj in 2007, I was asked to pray for a Christian who spent a lot of money to renovate the Mosque at the Hajj camp of the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Ikeja, who felt irritated by the nonchalant attitude of Muslim moneybags to the ramshackle state of that Mosque. And shortly thereafter, I also observed Jum’at prayers at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan Mosque where the Imam told the congregation that the renovation of that Mosque had just been completed by a concerned Christian. Yes, it is true that some Muslims also build or renovate Churches but the fact remains that there is no much negligence on the part of Christians towards their Churches as there is on the part of Muslims towards their Mosques. Where then are the Muslims?

    Islam preceded Christianity in reaching the shores of Nigeria by about 500 years. The one came in the 11th century. The other came in the 16th century. Yet the gap, in terms of education and development between both today, is as wide as that between the rise and the set of the sun. If this is blamed on colonial rule, on what should failure of Islamic education be blamed? The Qur’an which embodies the language of Islamic worship is known to have been translated into only two Nigerian languages (Hausa and Yoruba). And this is the best that has been done so far, in about 1000 years, to make that sacred book understandable to millions of Nigerian Muslims. Arabic is not a Nigerian language. Most Muslims do memorise some contents of the Qur’an and recite them when observing Salat without comprehending what they are reciting. If majority of the adherents of a religion are tied to illiteracy and ignorance, how can such a religion be understood? The Bible which came to Nigeria 500 years after the arrival of the Qur’an has been translated into at least about six Nigerian languages and further efforts are being made to do more. Where are the Muslims?

    In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the praise-singing records especially in the Southwest were waxed for Muslim money bags who hardly saw any need to train their children. And that was the time when non-Muslims would rather starve than see their children out of school. Today, the result speaks clearly for itself. Currently, it is said that over 10 million Nigerian children of school age are out of school. There are no readily available figures to delineate their percentages on the basis of religion. But one can be sure that over 80% of them will be Muslims. If this is the case in the age of internet, why won’t Muslims form majority of the touts in motor parks as well as hooligans working for politicians? And there is a glaring evidence for this especially in Ibadan, the political Centre of Yoruba nation where hooliganism is taken for a calling. Where are the Muslims?

    After many years of struggling to get their economic and political rights failed, the people of the Southsouth of Nigeria discovered the enormous power of the media to win wars where weapons are helpless. They quickly invested heavily in it. And today, they are not only getting their rights on demand, they are also compelling the entire world to listen to them as they now control the Nigerian media which they use to command the attention of all and sundry. Where are the Muslim media after the demise of Bashorun MKO Abiola and the dysfunction of his Concord newspaper? Rather than investing in the future, an average Nigerian Muslim moneybag prefers to eat his cake now with the hope of having it again later. Rather than fighting a just course, an average Nigerian Muslim elite pitches his tent with the wrong camp just to gain a momentary benefit. Or how does one place a situation like that of Abiola who, as a matter of right, contested Presidential election and won only for fellow Muslims to gang up and annul the election unjustifiably and thereafter clamped the winner into prison as a transit towards his final demise? That ugly episode is the seed of cord of the bitter political fruit that Nigerians are now being forced to eat and swallow.

    If there is any hope for the future of Islam, the focus must be towards the West. And that is in confirmation of Prophet Muhammad’s prophecy of over 1,400 years ago when he said that one of the signs of recognising the nearness of the ‘Last Day’ was for the sun to start rising from the West. The sun which the Prophet meant was not the physical one. That sun is ISLAM. And we have started to see its rays coming from the West where the divine religion is growing geometrically and recognised as the fastest growing religion in the world today. It could not have been otherwise. Islam is a religion of knowledge. It takes only the knowledgeable to recognise it as such. The West today is the home of knowledge and not a mere region of literacy. That is why it takes a religion of knowledge to be fast spreading among knowledgeable people.

    However, for those of us who are so much concerned about the situation of Islam vis a vis the Muslims especially in Nigeria today, there is consolation. That consolation is from Allah who says in Qur’an 15 Verse 9 thus: “It was ‘We’ who revealed the Qur’an and it is ‘We’ who will certainly preserve it”. We pray Allah to wake up the Muslims from their slumber so that in the future, our grand children will have no cause to repeat the question: “Where are the Muslims?

  • PDP RETURN: The Orji Kalu redox

    PROLOGUE: The Call of the Wild: This matter of the rather desperate return of Chief Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), keeps reminding me of Jack London’s more than a century- old classic, The Call of the Wild. Those who are familiar with this little but hounding book will recognise that PDP and even to a larger extent, Nigeria, could well be the setting for London’s 1903 epic novel. Simplified, The Call of the Wild is about the crazed era of the gold rush of the early twentieth century when the Western world thought there was a surfeit of gold in the ice-decked Northern hemisphere. The quest for gold in a hellish environment was brutish and ultimately futile as “In the end, the gold is washed away. It returns to the earth from which it was pried.” The Call, in summary, tells us that we humans in our frenzied pursuit of the banal, miss the essence of life.

    PROGNOSIS: I had written about Kalu and his attempt to re-join his PDP cohorts late last year after the Wadata House (PDP’s Abuja head office) drama during which his state governor literally mobilized to fence him off the precincts of the building. Though the action of the Abia State governor had caused a stir, I had argued that Kalu’s desperation to regroup with a party he jettisoned about seven years earlier to found his own party, is, to say the least, embarrassing and inimical to his quest for Igbo leadership. I raised numerous questions including the fact that he would never in the life of him, have brooked the effrontery of a parallel camp in a party where he sits as a governor and leader. NEVER. And I posited that if he had a political party that captured two states in the Southeast and which Ndigbo were willing to align with had he provided the requisite leadership, and he threw it all overboard, then his leadership credentials are suspect.

    One would think that Kalu would sleep over this ill-advised and utterly denigrating political gambit. Not by any chance, it seems. He must have had a most remarkable Yuletide plotting and sharpening the dah for his next political masterstroke which is to seize the Abia PDP – by any means possible. The plot matured in the New Year and by mid January, some village wags were corralled into issuing Kalu a verisimilitude of a PDP membership card. Knowing that loose brotherhood called PDP very well, you could ‘generate’ a membership card and register by any street corner if you so desperately seek to do so. It is a very loose, if not lousy confederacy, PDP.

    When it came out that Kalu had eventually returned to the PDP passing through an obscure bush path in his Igbere village, one only had a good laugh. This is the ultimate Orji Kalu redox – a desperate and diminishing quest for relevance; and it had to be executed secretly in a rustic, nether area of the country; far removed from the rest of the world. Say, how could this show have escaped the ubiquitous beam of the media? How could an Orji Kalu return to PDP without feasting and fanfare; without the knowledge of party leaders in the State? Again, is this how the OUK persona has shrunken? Why wouldn’t the PDP hierarchy accord him some respect by way of a reception?

    Now that Kalu has ‘rejoined’ PDP through the back yard, has he publicly renounced the leadership of his party, the Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA)? Or is it possible to be a member of one party and a leader of another? What is his message to his mass of confused followers currently trapped in PPA? Where does this leave Ndigbo and Kalu’s campaign for an Igbo to be the next president of Nigeria?

    EPILOGUE: What we see here is opportunism sneaking into bed with megalomania. It is indeed a call of the wild. This entire enterprise is all about three persons: Orji, Uzor and Kalu locked in a futile yet maniacal pursuit of the great ‘prize’. It is gold rush as always. Poor Abians are the grass that will be trampled in this turf fight being set up by Kalu. The sitting governor will now be distracted more than ever as he spends time, energy and resources fending off the onslaught of Kalu and his hounds and fighting for the soul of PDP in the State. Isn’t there is a certain godly virtue in stepping away from the arena, especially after you have done your bit and allowing your underlings some space to make even their own mistakes? To tarry in the arena eternally is to play god.

    Kalu could have led and can still lead PPA to greatness if he was a leader. Where are honour, principle and dignity in this singular move of crawling back to PDP? This explains why few leaders have emerged from Igboland lately; most so called leaders are desperate hustlers even after being two-term governors. It is hoped that kalu would someday grow bigger than Abia, than even PDP.

    LAST MUG: Maku’s merry-go-round across Nigeria: Irrepressible federal information minister, Mr Labaran Maku has his job well-defined and cut out for him but we wonder why he is currently criss-crossing the country trying to do the jobs of state information commissioners and chief press secretaries. Pity, that Maku may have happened upon the dubious template used by the erstwhile occupier of that office, Prof Jerry Gana and he chose to run with it. What great pity? The no-brainer he calls the “Good Governance Tour” which takes him across the States of Nigeria must be part two of the Media Tour of about 10 years back that earned Gana no plaudits.

    How can Maku deign to tour the 36 States and inspect their projects? That’s what we call Afghanistanism in journalism; he should be inspecting and showcasing federal government projects. That is his brief and he is failing at it if he must know. Even the modest efforts of his government are not adequately showcased to the public. Where are the power plants? Where are the green field refineries? Where are the on-going airport remodelling? Where are the FG-assisted rice plants? Where are the strategic grain silos? Where are the burgeoning new federal universities? There must be some roads being fixed by FERMA and the Ministry of Works; where are they? Where is the monthly Nigeria Journal that was doing a bit of this sometime ago? Where is his Ministry’s weekly reports and updated website, etc? Honorable Minister there is so much on your table to do so quit chasing the wind and dabbling into other people’s job which you lack the capacity to do anyway. What would be your legacy?

    The clean-shaven criminal: if a clean visage betokens a benign heart, Mr John Yakubu Yusufu would be an angel. I have never seen a better shaven face since Gillette declared war against the male beard (don’t look up now) and other bodily hairs. Did you see his photo in the papers yesterday? He cropped even his eyebrows so clean as if to erase his guilt. Of course we all must know Yusufu now; the deputy director of Police Pension Office who admitted to stealing over N20 billion. We ask: if a mere deputy director could heft so much cash, where were his directors, permanent secretary, t he supervising minister and the auditors? What manner of man would covet so much cash and what manner of system would let him have such access?

  • Muslim marital homes

    Muslim marital homes

    Marriage is part of my tradition. Whoever is capable but refuses to marry is not part of me” Prophet Muhammad (SAW)

     This article is being recalled here today due to popular demand. When it was first published in this column sometime ago, many Muslim couples in Nigeria saw it as a true mirror of their matrimonial homes. Many others took it for a matrimonial handbook capable of serving as a guide for the conduct of their homes. Yet, many who missed the article at that time and only heard of it from others have since been calling for its repetition in this column. And because of the value it may add to Muslim homes and the role it may play in resolving conflicts in those homes, ‘The Message’ decided to re-publish it here today for the benefit of all and sundry. Here it goes:

    “A radical 20th century India-born British journalist and novelist, George Orwell, wrote a famous allegorical fable entitled ‘ANIMAL FARM’ in 1945. His tacit focus in that novel was mainly on the Russian revolution of 1917 which he satirised venomously. While writing the novel, that social critic never thought that any possible ripples could arise from it which might have a backlash effect on the entire human social life in the 21st century. But ironically, with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), in the early 1990s the real exoteric application of that book has become manifest on the entire social life of today’s mankind. This will be explained shortly.

    Perhaps no institution in human life is as temporally or spiritually valuable as marriage. This is an indisputable fact across nations, races and religions. Marriage is the main axis around which the continuity of human existence on earth rotates. It is the pivotal source of decency or clear cause of malfeasance in any given society. Without marriage, human societies would have been like Orwell’s Animal Farm. And were Orwell alive today he would have probably redirected his attention towards the matrimonial homes globally.

    Through the media, we read and hear of dissolution of marriages in our customary courts, everyday, as if dissolution is the main character of marriage. And the impression often created in the media through the names of the involved couples is that these dissolution affect only Muslim marriages. What is most disturbing in this development is that the local courts which dissolve those marriages were never involved in their consummation ab initio. And yet marriages dissolved daily without passing through any court are uncountable. Nowadays, the rate of dissolution of marriages is by far higher than the rate at which marriages are consummated. At least, going by the local customs of the various tribes in Nigeria one can conclude that marriages are conducted weekly throughout the country as against the daily occurrences of divorce.

    There is a pertinent question here: What is the role of religion in marital life? Most marriages in our society are consummated in Mosques or Churches because majority of Nigerians claim to be Muslims or Christians. Yet the same Mosques and Churches turn their backs when those marriages begin to collapse and pretend not to know that the homes of their adherents are crumbling. Isn’t a major duty of religious bodies to maintain tranquility in the society? How can societal tranquility be maintained without matrimonial stability?

    Some people define marriage as a legalisation of intercourse and procreation of children without any reference to its divine sanctity. Others call it a social contract culturally or legally consummated between two consenting mature people of opposite genders. The latter definition is also silent on the obligation and responsibilities of such a union. In Islam, marriage is much more than both definitions. It is on one hand, a promise made by the male gender who is soon to become the husband and on the other, a trust personified by the female gender who will soon become the wife in the custody of the husband. It (marriage) is an agreement between two families aimed at creating an avenue for continuity of social life through a common social venture jointly managed by the two representatives of both families in their bid to set up a home of their own. In the life of any serious human being, three events are fundamentally essential. These are birth, marriage and death. The three form the axis around which the entire human life rotates. All other events are peripheral.

    Throughout the world today (Nigeria inclusive), marriage has become a balloon which can be casually inflated in one minute and deflated in the next minute. It has been taken for a mere chess game played for the fun of the players as well as that of the onlookers. To most Nigerians today, marriage is only as important as dining, wining, singing and dancing. And to many young couples, it is just a legitimate means of actualising sexual urge that would have been perceived as a social aberration without passing through a formal matrimonial communion.

    In a public lecture delivered in Lagos sometime ago, yours sincerely compared a marital couple to a pair of scissors which has two blades. Each of those blades faces a different direction. The one faces right while the other faces left. These positions are not naturally interchangeable. Yet, with the nuptial tie knotting them together in the middle to seal their common destiny, the two blades jointly work assiduously in their move to certify the essence of that togetherness.

    If you look at a pair of scissors very carefully, you will discover that the two blades therein sometimes stick closely together and sometimes stand out separately. Their meeting and parting randomly accentuate the essence of their togetherness. Through those meeting and parting, the two blades of the pair of scissors communicate effectively and mutually function dutifully. There is a marital lesson for human beings to learn from this. No husband can play the role of his wife. Neither can any wife play the role of her husband. The separation of powers in the matrimonial home has been naturally ordained.

    Just as the two blades of a pair of scissors face different directions but work intimately together so should any marital couple be. If the blades stick together permanently without opening and closing, the tendency is for them to rust away and become useless to each other. And, if on the other hand, they stay apart permanently thereby leaving the scissors in permanent open position they will never be able to jointly carry out the assignment for which they are manufactured. Thus, through random meeting and parting of those blades, the pair of scissors is able to perform its duty without any hindrance. And as the blades grow older, they become weaker and less active. So is the situation with marital couples.

    Unfortunately today, marriage has become like the country called Nigeria where projects are hurriedly executed to satisfy the secret (under the table) terms of contract without any consideration for the quality and maintenance of such projects. When two young people of different genders and backgrounds are coming together to form a couple, they hardly think of the implications of such a union in terms of individual differences and the possible challenges that may emanate from those differences. Young couples of today perceive love either from beauty point of view or from endowed wealth or even from pleasure of sexual intercourse. And that is a way of turning infatuation or possession of material wealth or sexual enjoyment into love which is usually the cause of marital collapse.

    In marriage, love develops only gradually with mutual understanding especially when it becomes evident that one spouse accommodates the weaknesses of the other through tolerance and compromise. The attraction which beauty or wealth or intercourse engenders can only at best generate tentative LIKENESS and not LOVE in the real sense. This is where the foundation of divorce is often laid even before the consummation of marriage. There is nothing called love in a matrimonial home in the absence of thorough study and understanding of each other as well as compromises and tolerance. It is not enough to claim mutual understanding through mutual study during courtship. No matter how long it may last, the period of courtship can never be enough for any couple to fully understand each other. That period is usually to impress each other while the tendency to pretend is often disguised.

    Marriage is a serious business which must be seriously negotiated initially by the concerned couples and their parents. At the courtship stage, the concerned couple must not only discuss the modalities of coming together as husband and wife they must also negotiate the factors of sustaining their marriage through proper maintenance of the home. Any marriage without a programme of maintenance and sustenance will become like dew used by a farmer for watering crops into fruition.

    In his recommendation to men searching for wives, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said: “Wives are married on the basis of four factors: beauty, wealth, family background and faith”. He however emphasised (Islamic) FAITH as the strongest factor for Muslim couples. He did not recommend such factors to women knowing the difficulties that women might face in making choice of men but he strongly recommended that a woman’s consent in a marriage involving her be considered as germane. The Prophet then concluded that any marriage without such consent is invalid.

    Marriages are globally collapsing at an alarming rate today because couples and their families have closed their eyes to two key factors in maintaining the matrimonial home. These factors are COMMUNICATION and MUTUAL RESPECT. No marriage can ever survive or succeed without a thorough pre-marital counselling by parents, guardians or religious clerics who must not only tutor potential couples but also demonstrate practically to them how marriages are sustained using their own marriages as examples. Newly married couples often dream of building their homes on the models of certain older couples in the society. The consummators of new marriages in the Muslim community must be part of those models.

    There can be no matrimonial peace in the absence of adequate communication between husband and wife based on mutual respect. Nothing signals the collapse of a marriage more than the breakdown of communication in the home. A marriage without communication is like a house without door. Of course, the children from such homes are mostly the victims of any ensued divorce. If a marriage is initiated and consummated with communication, how can anybody think that such a marriage can be sustained without communication?

    The real essence of marriage is for husband and wife to disagree in order to agree, not the other way round. And in the process of disagreeing or agreeing, communication is the only key instrument without which the home can never remain intact.

    Any couple that closes the matrimonial door to communication has surely opened that door for divorce. Even divorce, whether through mutual agreement or through court injunction, must be communicated in one way or another to both parties.

    In Islam, one of the most potent ways of ventilating communication in the home is to worship and pray together at least twice in a day (morning and evening). A Muslim husband must at least be knowledgeable enough to lead his family in Salat and to preach and pray for such family daily. Through such worship and prayer, many knotty matrimonial issues are untied. And besides, the children will learn to be good-mannered and to resolve disagreements among themselves. That is why Muslims are urged to acquire knowledge about their religion. The spate of divorce in any society today is much higher among the ignorant couples than the knowledgeable ones.

    By remaining indifferent to the rate of divorce among Nigerian Muslims, the Mosques are shirking one of their foremost responsibilities. It has been said repeatedly in this column that Mosques are not meant for Salat alone. As a matter of fact, Salat can be observed congregationally or individually anywhere that is clean and not necessarily in a building called Mosque. A Mosque in Islam does not have to be a building if its purpose is just to observe Salat. That is why Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said “the entire earth has been made the Mosque for Muslims once it is purified”.

    One of the fundamental duties of a Mosque is to sanitise the society by finding resolution to conflicts. And since no conflict can be more devastating to any society than that of the matrimonial homes it becomes incumbent on every Mosque to have a Conflict Resolution Committee constituted by learned scholars and headed by an Islamic jurist.

    As a duty, the Imam of the Mosque must also be well educated enough to educate the congregation in his Mosque on the need to take their matrimonial conflicts to the Mosques or Shari’ah courts where such conflicts can be solemnly resolved rather than to customary courts where marriages are dissolved with fiat. Matrimonial conflicts are not new to any modern society. What seems new and worrisome about them is the geometric leap they are taking these days.

    The very first conflict in human history was over marriage. And that was the conflict between the first and second sons of Adam (Qabil and Habil) otherwise known as Cain and Abel over the choice of wife. And the genesis of the perennial disagreement between Muslims and non-Muslims of Semitic origin in the world today was the matrimonial rivalry between the two wives of Prophet Ibrahim, Zahrah and Hajarah, (Sarah and Hagar).

    If the Mosques cannot resolve conflicts arising from the marriages they once consummated to save Muslim homes, what other conflicts can they claim to be resolving? It is embarrassingly shameful to see hundreds of Muslim marriages demolished by customary courts while the Mosques keep aloof.

    Today, Nigerian society is prone to danger of insecurity mostly because of matrimonial instability. And the more marriages are consummated, the more matrimonial homes crumble. Who, then, will save the society by saving our matrimonial homes? That is the biggest question of this time which is begging for a very positive answer. The security of Nigeria as a country depends very much on the stability of matrimonial homes. That is why emphasis should rather be laid on stability of homes than on distribution of contraceptives for the purpose of reducing procreation. There can be no peaceful nation without peaceful homes. God bless our homes.

  • Teacher quality and student outcome

    Teacher quality and student outcome

    The four most crucial pieces indispensable to the all-important task of educating our children include the parent, the government, the teacher, and the student. My comments in the last four weeks have focused on the government and its responsibility to educate citizens. Last week, I dealt with the need for a public-private partnership for which the public sector has to provide leadership and direction. Some may be troubled by the disproportionate focus on government in this matter. After all, parents who brought children in the world ought to be responsible for their upbringing, and some are against the provision of free education at any level precisely on the basis of such reasoning. I think that they are wrong but I will not pause to pursue this argument here. Today, I take on one of the other pieces in the puzzle, namely the teacher.

    I should start with a confession. Having been a teacher all my life, I have a bias in favour of the profession because I have not had a sustained experience of any other. One of the greatest joys of a teacher is to be pulled aside by a former student who you now don’t remember and who has apparently done well, and be reminded that you were his or her teacher. This is why, for me, student outcome is the most important affirmation of the teacher’s success. The joy of a teacher, the motivator-in-chief, is the achievement of his or her students. I see myself in the accomplishment of the students that pass through me and that is why I make extra efforts, many times beyond the call of duty and at the expense of personal welfare, to ensure that my students have the quality of instruction from me that puts them in the path of success. This was what I received from my teachers. It is what teaching is about.

    Teaching is often referred to as the noble profession. If education is about molding the nation, the teacher is the most important molder and the nation’s children are the clay. If we continue with the metaphor of the potter and the clay, it is instructive to note that the quality of the pottery depends on the quality of the potter. Is the potter knowledgeable in what she does? Is she patient? Is her aesthetic sense so trained that she appreciates beauty and pursues it? Then the works of her hands should be of high quality. So it is with the teacher as the potter of the nation.

    As I went through my first training as a Grade III teacher, I was exposed to a large number of literatures on teacher preparation. In 1962, Randall Butisingh, a life-long teacher, wrote that a “teacher must know that he or she is teaching, not only a subject, but a child. A good teacher, by his or her methods will be able to motivate the pupil, waken his interest, and arouse his curiosity. Teachers can make learning pleasant. They must exhibit energy, enthusiasm and cheerfulness, and never cease to learn themselves. A teacher who ceases to learn becomes irrelevant.” This last point cannot be stated more forcefully. And the question is,” what is the state of our teacher preparation?” And “what is the quality of our teacher cadre?”

    If we take education seriously, and if the future success of our children, and thus of our nation is important to us, then it must be reflected in the emphasis that we place on teacher preparation and teacher quality. This is not just a task for the government; it is equally the task of the teacher’s union. And it is the focus of attention and efforts in nations that we have considered advanced in the matter of educational attainments.

    The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) recently released a report on teacher preparation and teacher quality. In her foreword to the report titled “Raising the Bar: Aligning and elevating teacher preparation and the teaching profession,” Randi Weingarten, AFT President comes out forcefully against what she refers to as a “common rite of passage, whereby newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms, expected to figure things out, and left to see if they (and their students) sink or swim. Such a haphazard approach to the complex and crucial enterprise of educating children is wholly inadequate. It’s unfair to both students and teachers, who want and need to be well-prepared to teach from their first day on the job.” In the case of this country, we are worse off. For what we do is toss our classroom keys to anyone—trained or not—and we leave them to see if they and their students sink or swim. How many of our classroom teachers are trained teachers? How many have adequate (not to talk of superior) knowledge of the subjects they teach?

    It is interesting to note that the AFT is the professional organisation of teachers in the United States. It doesn’t see itself as just a trade organisation only interested in the struggle for the welfare of its members. It also recognises that as a professional organisation, it has to worry about its end product—the student outcome. This is why it insists on “raising the bar” of the teaching profession. Consider the following recommendations from the organisation: First, it recommends that the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards must take the leading role in bringing together all stakeholders to define a “rigorous entry bar for beginning teachers, just as it has established a process for becoming an accomplished board-certified teacher.”

    Second, the AFT recommends an entry bar for the profession that must include “rigorous preparation” and “a demonstration of teaching ability through performance assessment.” Third, it recommends that the “process of establishing the bar and ensuring its professional standards are maintained should involve all stakeholders but be driven by teachers and teacher educators.” In other words, what AFT is recommending for the teaching profession is akin to what lawyers and physicians have in place for their professions. No lawyer is allowed to practice unless he or she passes the Bar. No doctor is allowed to practice unless he or she is certified by the Board of Physicians.

    The Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT) has the responsibility to move the teaching profession forward not by standing in the way of reasonable standards but by leading the effort to improve teacher standard and thus student outcome. Some recent stories on positions taken by the NUT against specific actions of state governments suggest a rethinking of the organisation on its role as the champion of the noble profession. In one such story, the Bauchi State chapter of the organisation went on strike for three weeks in protest against the decision of the state government to “send about 5,000 unqualified teachers back to school.” If it was established that these 5,000 were truly unqualified, and they were being sent back to school for proper qualification, why would an organisation that promotes quality teaching protest such a decision? And why would the union stand against continuous evaluation and assessment of the classroom effectiveness of teachers through periodic testing?

    Surely, governments need to work with the NUT and other professional organisations in coming up with policy measures for the improvement of teaching in our schools. But in the final analysis, it is the responsibility of the government, as the custodian of the public trust, to promote quality education through appropriate policies to ensure successful students outcome.

  • The national interest in education

    The national interest in education

    Last week, I raised and addressed the question, “how have our contemporary society fared with regard to discharging the grave responsibility to educate its offspring?” The question presupposes an affirmation of the society’s responsibility to educate. For it is only with that presumption that we have reason to evaluate its performance in discharging that responsibility. The presumption is not difficult to defend, as I did two years ago.

    “While the provision of good education is just one of the many functions of a government, it is one that is central to the challenges of any nation including that of violent disturbances that have overrun African nations since independence.

    “Education is central in several respects. It gives an individual a sense of self-esteem and self-respect. It gives an assurance that he or she can make a contribution to the society. It is a mind-opener enabling the individual to see the many aspects of the complexity of the human predicament. Even when an educated person is a radical critic of the establishment, he or she can make relevant distinctions, giving the proverbial Caesar his due. Above all, a good education stands an individual in good stead to see other human beings for what they are as humans with inviolable dignity. It is this ability to make distinctions and to move back and assess from a judicious perspective, and to bring to an issue a sense of proportion that prevents an educated person from engaging in senseless acts of genocide.

    “Surely, history is replete with highly educated persons that have led their nations in genocidal campaigns. Hitler is the most famous. I do not deny the eccentricity that even good education can produce. What I deny is that such is common or rampant. What is common is for a few educated eccentrics to mobilise and use mobs of less educated or uneducated gangs with less hope for their future and virtually no self-esteem. This is the common phenomenon. A person with good education who is dissatisfied with her position can channel her frustration to useful purposes and will not be easily cajoled into regrettable path. A frustrated person with no functional education is an easy prey for rabble rousers. It’s just a fact of life borne out of our experiences. Politicians know better.”

    Now, while there may be a tiny minority of the leadership cadre that does not share the foregoing reasoning, I am pretty sure that most leaders appreciate it and they are very passionate about the responsibility of society to educate its citizens. But when we look at our national score card, it’s pretty grim. And it doesn’t just exist in research reports; it’s out there in the street corners of our downtowns and inner cities in the sea of heads that we contemplate every day. How the spectacle doesn’t prick our conscience and we are unmoved by the obvious irreparable damage to human dignity is mind-boggling.

    For the majority of those who care, the issue has always been the scarcity of resources. This is no doubt true. Ours is a nation that appreciates the joy of large families. Whether from a religious or cultural perspective, we cannot see ourselves imposing limitations on the reproductive freedom of citizens and so, we rightly leave the choice of reproduction to individuals and families. I think it’s the correct policy. What comes with it, however, is an adequate planning that enables us to project for the needs of those children for their first twenty one years of life, that is, from elementary to tertiary education.

    Of course, while such planning and projection may tell us what we need in terms of resources, they are not substitutes for those resources. In other words, with adequate planning, we may come to know that in 2023, we would need ten trillion naira to provide good primary education for the nation’s children. We still have to source for those funds and start doing so right now. It is the nation that has to do the planning, the projection, and the search for the funds, even when it is clear that the public sector cannot do it all alone.

    The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Article 18, states that (1) “Government shall direct its policy towards ensuring that there are equal and adequate educational opportunities at all levels. 2. Government shall promote science and technology. 3. Government shall strive to eradicate illiteracy; and to this end Government shall as and when practicable provide (a) free, compulsory and universal primary education; free secondary education; free university education; and free adult literacy programme.” We have the constitutional provision; we must summon the vision and the will to effectively implement it.

    Statistics don’t lie and ours go a long way to demonstrate the correlation between the underdevelopment of the mind and the pathetic underdevelopment of the nation. Eight years ago in 2005, education expenditure in Nigeria as a percentage of Gross National Income (GNI) was 0.85%. As a result, the country was ranked 167 out of 168 in the world. In comparison, Brazil’s education expenditure was 4.09% of GNI with a ranking of 83. Nigeria’s public spending on education as a percentage of GDP was 0.89%, with a ranking of 136th out of 136. While the duration of our compulsory education is 6 years, Brazil’s is 8 years. Of course, it is needless to add that we do not enforce the 6 year-rule in any way and we have a majority of under-6 who never attend school. While we rank 104 in the completion rate of primary education, Brazil ranks 13. While our adult literacy rate is 48%, Brazil’s is 82%. (NationMaster.com)

    What Nigeria fails to put into the education of her citizens, she cannot expect to get out of the economy. Thus while the number of Brazilians living with under $1 a day is 11.6 million, with a ranking of 44th in the world, Nigeria has 70.2 million living with less than $1 a day and a ranking of 2nd in terms of poverty. In other words, Nigeria enjoys the infamy of ranking 2nd in the incidence of poverty. While Brazil has 1.82% share of world’s poor, Nigeria has 8.03%; and while the Human Development Index of Brazil is 0.792, with a ranking of 63rd, that of Nigeria is 0.452 with a ranking of 159th. (NationMaster.com). It is the whirlwind that is naturally stirred up by these grim statistics that we experience on our streets on a daily basis.

    While public education suffers neglect, private education blossoms because government has outsourced its responsibility to educate its citizens. When officials at the highest level of government applaud private education, assessing it as the model to embrace, it appears that the nation has lost an important moral bearing. Private investment in education cannot be and has never been altruistically motivated. The closest to altruism in motivation were old mission institutions. But we always knew that they had their primary mission (no pun intended) which was not necessarily the national interest. On the other hand, individual private entrepreneurs in education have never been ambiguous in their mission, which is to fill the gap created by the inaction of the state and in doing so, make some profit.

    The reasoning in the preceding paragraph is not to suggest that all private involvement in the education of the public is ill-motivated or to be discouraged. What it means is that the public sector must be the driver of the nation’s educational vehicle, and public schools must take the lead. There is room for public-private partnership in every aspect of national life, including education. However, the cart of private initiative must not be allowed to pull the horse of national interest in citizen education. For the nation, like the individual, is the best source and judge of its interests.

  • Holiday pickings

    I have been away on holiday for about forty days. Though I was only able to remove myself from the buzz of the newsroom and the whirls and paranoia of the news process, I could never extricate myself from the news and the Siamese companionship it has provided over these years. In spite of vows to the contrary, a day without my morning dew of news seemed like a void in the history of mankind. So as I lolled between Lagos and the Southeast and particularly, waddling through the red-cloud dust of long- forgotten roads in Igbo countryside where I holidayed, I still managed to get a whiff of the news.

    Being garroted by news, so to speak, was distracting enough; I did not realize I was taking a mental note of major activities to boot. My mind simply would not play to instruction as football coaches would say of their boys when they fluff a game, by shutting down its news compartments. Well, what to do than to take advantage of a bad situation by compiling a list of the big issues that broke while I was away – in some order of importance…

    The Police College metaphor: This yeoman’s job of Channels Television that is bound for awards was not high on my list of big issues until our dear President Goodluck Jonathan visited the scene of the ‘crime’. What had we not written about the Nigeria Police – their subhuman nature, their demonic tendencies, their habitations – but never before was it captured on camera like Channels did. And when the president did his impromptu inspection, the first I have seen, I was full of admiration and fresh hope welled up in me… but it seem I rejoiced too soon. Then President Jonathan laid an egg, to paraphrase a classic newspaper headline.

    One brilliant moment that laid a template for eternal validation of the president and he quenched his light! The Ikeja Police College muck is a metaphor for the Nigerian condition. Nigeria is a big muck that requires a Nehemiahian drive, energy, character, vision and tenacity. For a brief moment, as the president gawked at the ruins of the college, I thought a Nehemiah had come to work. But woe alas! I was cut down by a re-revelation of the Jonathan persona. The president was re-voided in the eyes of watching Nigerians. It was as if we woke up suddenly and returned to death.

    NNPC’s $1.5 b loan caper: until the Channels expose on the Police College, this was my pick for the news of the period. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, was about concluding a clandestine foreign loan! The deal was almost concluded but for the expose from a foreign wire service. Questions: how many other such ‘loans’ had NNPC taken in our name in the past? And before we enquire about what NNPC does with money, the real question is what really does NNPC do? It does not drill crude, it can’t run refineries or build new ones, it lacks the capacity to import and distribute refined products, it cannot safeguard the pipelines or stem oil theft, it is stumped by its most important duty which is managing the Joint Venture process. But most painful of all, it is violently corrupt. And with its new reach of hijacking foreign funds in our name, it has grown to the status of an evil enclave.

    Let us rename NNPC tormentum, some kind of crude machine for dishing punishment to the people; it has epitomized the ‘oil curse’ and somebody must document a case study on how not to manage oil wealth using the NNPC. Former federal minister, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili was so moved by this new scam to aptly come up with the phrase, “Republic of NNPC”. But that explains it all for after the incoherence about taking a loan to pay off even more loan, you would expect that heads would roll. But no such sanctions, the oil minister, the group managing director, everybody is still on his or her sit plotting more plots for that is all they seem to do. And the plot, make no mistake, often goes deep to the bottom of the very top. That is why it has remained unchanging seemingly but let’s be consoled brethren: bad behaviours only last for so long.

    Governors on AWOL: speaking of bad behavior, the photo of four Nigerian governors decked in winter coats and posing on a heap of London snow turns out an eloquent repudiation of the lies they try to sell Nigerians in that fake wintry posture. That carefully cropped photograph also corroborates the lie and fakery that Nigeria, no, Nigerian leaders and Nigerian governance have unrepentantly become. The picture on the front page of many newspapers on Wednesday January 23, 2013 had Godswill Akpabio (Akwa Ibom State), Gabriel Suswam (Benue), Sullivan Chime (Enugu and), Rotimi Amaechi, governor of Rivers State and chairman of governors Forum, Nigeria.

    They had taken the pains (and our pound Sterling) to go to London and pose in the blistering snow just to prove to Nigerians that Governor Chime who had been away from office since September is hale and hearty. It was Turai, the wife of late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who was quoted as saying that she would rather her husband died in office than returned home to proper rest, care and recuperation. And truly, that gentle soul was chaperoned to his death by a greedy cabal’s lust for power and relevance.

    Governor Chime, like Suntai and a few others is obviously seriously ill. It would have been most honorable to come clean to his people, even at the pain of losing that seat. That is the hallmark of character and that is the cornerstone for building a great nation. Yes when leaders show character a nation and her people are edified. Surely the governorship isn’t the utmost for Chime and his ilk. There must be more important things in life than being a governor. And for all the governors aiding and abetting falsehood: we say, shame.

    And several other pickings… what would it pay you to extend this rehash the way they do in Nollywood films. Bad governance in Nigeria is in a torrid flux and the more we report, the more rapidly things happen. It would suffice to reel out a list of some of the key issues I found deserving of your notice while I was away. I picked an interview granted by Mr Elias Mbam, chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) in which he claimed that political office holders are literally robbing the people. Hear him: “While the basic salaries of political office holders are largely known and perhaps pegged to what RMAFC has determined them to be, their allowances are mammoth, opaque and unconstitutional.” But the National Assembly would rather not discuss this matter but time will come when it must be discussed, by fire or by stones.

    · There were pictures of the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi frequently wearing his turban to the office. It is as if he can’t wait to be the emir of Kano. Well mum is the word here o!

    · Did you read it tucked inside the papers somewhere that 100 companies have been forced out of the Nigerian Stock Exchange since after the crash? Nobody has told you how many thousands of investors – poor Nigerians suffered in all this. No resolution, no recompense, no lessons learnt but more money has been dole out to many of the miscreants who caused the crash.

    · Malam Adamu Ciroma granted an interview in which he stated categorically that former President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Jonathan “bought PDP delegates with dollars in 2011” presidential primaries. Sadly, we all know that ‘fact’ and we live with it!

    · Nigeria’s telecoms subscriber spent N111 billion talking in 10 months (January to October 2012). What a loquacious people.

    · Ten million mobile telephones for Nigerian farmers. What boondoogle scheme? Does Nigeria really have 10 million people who can be truly called farmers? Not likely.

    · And lastly, the power situation worsens and Prof Chinedu Nebo comes in smoking like all previous power minister. Hmm.

  • An orphan’s legacy

    “Who shares his life’s pure pleasure and works the honest road; who trades with heaping measure and lifts his brother’s load; who turns the wrong down bluntly and lends the right a hand; he dwells in God’s own country and tills the holy land.” Louis F. Benson

    No man in history has ever been as fitting to the above poetic description as Prophet Muhammad (SAW) the undisputable greatest man who ever lived. His legacy is the solid foundation upon which the contemporary civilisation is built. But despite the vivid visibility of that legacy it remains invisible to many eyes that are alien to Islam. Thus, the Prophet’s legacy is like the beaming sun which no blind can see and no seeing eyes can perceive in its natural nakedness. Yet, both the blind and the seeing feel the burning effect of the sun ‘Willy nilly’ even as it photosynthesises the plants around them.

    This article is not meant to celebrate the birth of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) for which yesterday was declared a public holiday in Nigeria.

    As far as ‘The Message’ is concerned, what is to be celebrated about this great Prophet is by far much more than his birthday. His achievements clearly transcend his birth. Thus, there is no need wasting time on his birthday here.

    From the creation of Adam, the first human being, till date, no man’s biography has been so much written and read as that of Muhammad (SAW) the son of Abdullah and Aminah. This man’s biography has been written from all perspectives, positive and negative, by various men and women of diverse races, tribes, ideologies and religions in the past 1444 years or there about. And the biography is still being written and re-written authoritatively and un-authoritatively, today, in uncountable languages.

    Through the writings of the Prophet’s biography, some people have zoomed into un-dream-able fame. Others have sunk into the abyss of a permanent oblivion. But virtually all the writers have benefitted from their writings directly or indirectly in coins and in kind. No other Prophet’s biography has attracted as many writers from believers and non-believers, from friends and foes alike as that of Prophet Muhammad (SAW).

    Every aspect of this Prophet’s life including the dresses he wore, the food he ate, the way he spoke, the wives he married, the children he bore, and the wars he fought, has formed the basis of his biography. In short, next to the Qur’an, no book is as much read daily in the world today as the biography of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) in one form or another. But there is a vital question: why is global focus so much on this unlettered Prophet from Arabia?

    The answer to this question is not far-fetched. The world has not produced any other personality like him. And it will not. He is the seal of all Prophets and the epitome of human exemplariness. In him alone are found all the traits of what a perfect gentleman should be in all ramifications.

    If Prophet Muhammad had not been an orphan, he would not have been able to guide humanity on how orphans should be treated especially with regards to inheritance. If he had not been a husband, his marital life would not have been an excellent example for others to emulate and women’s rights would have been permanently ignored. If he had not been a widower the world would not have realised the plight of widows and learnt how to provide for them. If he had not been a father, the proper care for children by parents would have been relegated to the background in Islamic doctrine. If he had not been trustworthy, the value of trust would have been totally lost on mankind.

    His migration from Makkah to Madinah paved way for the culture of hospitality universally imbibed today and the wars he was forced to fight engendered the law of war, armistice and peace. Without the conquests he achieved, the word magnanimity would not have found a place in the dictionary of man and if he had not suffered defeat in war, the vanquished would not have learnt the act of gallantry. If the Prophet had not been a judge, the virtue of justice would have been globally thrown to the winds and survival in all societies would have been for the fittest.

    If he had not being a democratic ruler, the relationship between the ruled and their rulers, all over the world, today, would not have been dissimilar from that of slaves and their masters and dictatorship in governance would have known no bounds. If Prophet had not been poor despite being a Head of State, the policy of social welfare adopted in civilised societies today in favour of the poor, would not have been possible. If he had not been an illiterate, the world would not have known the difference between literacy and education. And, if, despite all these qualities in him, he had not been humble and affable, arrogance would have been the main character of all privileged people in the world today.

    Who else can be compared to this man in history? And, in which any other single person have all the aforementioned qualities ever been found in history? There can be little wonder then why so much attention was and is still being focused on the personality of this extra-ordinary human being. That is Prophet Muhammad (SAW) for you, the like of whom the world has never seen and will never see again. If this man is celebrated anywhere in the world, anytime, therefore, it is definitely not because he was born. His achievements transcend his birth.

    But for him, the world would have remained in the dungeon of ignorance and primitivism and humanity would have remained at the level of crude beasts. It was he who brought back the manual of life to mankind after it had been lost in the search for sheer vanity. Manual of life is the divine instruction which came gradually from Allah to mankind according to the growth rate of human intellect. But such manual is not peculiar to man alone. All other organisms have their own instructions from Allah which in a way constitute their own manuals of life.

    However, due to the intellectual superiority of man, the various divine instructions to other organisms were incorporated into man’s own manual of life. This is to enable man understand the complexity of his environment vis a vis the essence of his own existence and thereby act effectively as Allah’s vicegerent on earth. Although because of the differences in times and methods, Allah’s message is perceived differently, the fact remains that the message is only one coming from only one and same God. This message is the ‘RIGHT PATH’ to salvation which came to mankind after several millennia of wondering in the wilderness of ignorance and vainglory. And the man, Muhammad (SAW), through whom that message reached us is the ‘PATH FINDER’. There are many attestations to this. For instance, after many years of scientific experimentations, a German-born American physicist and Nobel Laureate, Albert Einstein, the inventor of atomic bomb who is generally known as the 20th century creator of special and general theory of relativity, compared his works with the contents of the Qur’an and concluded as follows: “Science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind”.

    He then called on fellow scientists to endeavour to read the Qur’an without bias in order to know the true origin of science in human life.

    And as if responding to Einstein’s call, Professor Tagatat Tajasen, Chairman of the Department of Anatomy at Chiang Mai University in Thailand accepted Islam on the strength of just one scientific sign accurately mentioned in the Qur’an. He had spent a great amount of his time, as a Professor, in search of pain receptor. When his attention was drawn to the Qur’an, he did not believe initially that such a highly sophisticated aspect of science could have been mentioned over 1,400 years ago. But when he confirmed it by himself in the translation of the Qur’an, he became so much impressed that he purposely attended the 8th Saudi Medical Conference held in Riyadh where he publicly embraced Islam.

    Another leading scientist, Professor Marshall Johnson, the Head of the Department of Anatomy a Director of Daniel Institute at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, USA, was asked to comment on the verses of the Qur’an dealing with embryology. In response, he said it was probable that for Prophet Muhammad (SAW) to have given such vivid description of foetus, he must have had a powerful microscope. But when he was reminded that the Qur’an was revealed over 1400 years ago and that the invention of microscope took place only a couple of centuries ago Professor Johnson laughed and made the following remark: “I see nothing here in conflict with the concept that Divine intervention was involved when Muhammad recited the Qur’an….”.

    Yet another Embryologist, Professor Keith Moore of the Department of Anatomy, University of Toronto, Canada, after carefully examining the translation of the Qur’anic verses presented to him admitted thus: “most of the information concerning embryology mentioned in the Qur’an is in perfect conformity with modern discoveries in the field of embryology and does not conflict with them in any way”.

    Professor Moore had no prior knowledge of anything leechlike about embryo until he read chapter 96 of the Qur’an where Allah says “Read! In the name of your Lord Who created. He created man out of a leechlike clot…” He then went to verify this fact in an embryo under a powerful microscope and compared his observation with a diagram of a leech. He was astonished at the resemblance of the two. That prompted him to go fully into studying the Qur’an and Hadith to acquire more knowledge until he was able to answer about 80 hitherto unanswered questions in that field.

    That prompted him to correct the contents of his book ‘The Developing Human’ which he published earlier and he re-published it in 1982. It was with that revised edition that he became the recipient of an award for the best medical book written by a single author in the 20th century. That book has been translated into many major languages of the world and is mostly used as textbook of embryology today in the first year of medical studies in various Universities in the world.

    Yet, despite talking about all sciences, the Qur’an is not a book of Sciences but that of ‘Signs’. Those ‘Signs’ invite man to realise the purpose of his existence on earth and live in harmony with nature.

    Judging the above verses of the Qur’an revealed over 1400 years ago with the wonderful reality of scientific civilisation of today what further proof does anybody need of the genuineness of the Qur’an? And who else can give better guidance than the Supreme Creator Himself? And who else can be better called the ‘PATH FINDER’ than Prophet Muhammad (SAW) who showed humanity the way to that all time guidance?

    Perhaps, this was why Michael Hart, a Jewish American Astrophysicist, named Prophet Muhammad the greatest man that ever lived in his famous book entitled ‘The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History’.

    If all the descriptions given above about Prophet Muhammad (SAW) sound exaggerated because they are given by Femi Abbas, a Muslim and an ardent follower of that Prophet, and if Michael Hart is seen as crazy in his judgment let us read the views and impressions of some other non-Muslims about this great Prophet. One of them (Alphonse de Lamartine of France) had the following to say in his book ‘Histoire de la Torque’:

    “Never has a man set for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a more sublime aim since this aim was superhuman; to subvert superstitions which had been interposed between man and his Creator; to render God unto man and man unto God; to restore rational and sacred idea of divinity amidst the chaos of the material and disfigured gods of idolatry, then existing.

    Never has a man undertaken a work so far beyond human power with so feeble means, for he (Muhammad) had in the conception as well as in the execution of such a great design no other instrument than himself, and no other, except a handful of men living in a corner of a desert…. If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astounding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in modern history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled before their very eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples and dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls. On the basis of a book, every letter of which has become law, he created a spiritual nationality which blended together peoples of every tongue and of every race…..As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured we may well ask, is there any man in human history greater than Muhammad?”

    On his own, Napoleon Bonaparte, the great 18th century French conqueror of Europe was so much amazed by the traits of Islam which he saw in Egypt during his military expeditions that he made the following historic statement about that divine religion and its great Prophet:

    “Muhammad, in reality, was a great leader of mankind. He preached UNITY among Arabs who were, till then, torn asunder due to internecine quarrels, sometimes resulting in bloody war fares. He brought them out of the obscure world in a short time and the discipline which they maintained under his leadership was simply marvellous, and so was their bravery, courage and devotion to the cause which they loved and cherished. This, coupled with the contempt for death, as taught by their leader, made them great soldiers and fighters like of whom history rarely produces. I simply marvel at the achievements of this great ‘Son of the Desert’ within a mere period of less than 15 years; a thing which Moses and Christ could not do in 15 centuries. I salute this great man; I salute his qualities of Head and Heart….”

    And, in corroboration of the above statements, variously made by renowned men of letters and intellect, another foremost Orientalist, playwright and dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, had the following to say about Islam and Prophet Muhammad (SAW) in his book ‘The genuine Islam’ (vol. 1 No 8 of 1936):

    “The Christians and their missionaries have presented a horrible

    picture of Islam. Not only that, they also carried out an organised and planned propaganda against the personality of Prophet Mohammad and the religion he preached. I have carefully studied Islam and the life of its Prophet. I have done so both as a student of history and as a critic. And I have come to the conclusion that Mohammad was indeed a great man and a deliverer and benefactor of mankind which was till then writhing under a most agonizing pain. I have always held Islam in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing face of existence which can make it appealing to every age. I have studied him-the wonderful man and in my opinion, far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the saviour of humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world, he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness.

    I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today”.

    For confirmation of Bernard Shaw’s remark quoted above, see ‘The Genuine Islam, vol. 1, No. 8, 1936.

    These are just some of the facts that make an orphan and unlettered Prophet, Muhammad (SAW), the greatest human being that ever lived on earth. None of the attestations above made any reference to his birth or birthday because they knew that his birth had nothing to do with his achievements. If non-Muslims could go as far as shown above to benefit from the greatness of Prophet Muhammad’s mission on earth what is expected of Muslims for whom that mission is primarily meant?

  • The nation and the education of the public

    The nation and the education of the public

    Last week, I ended my comments with a reference to Nyerere’s idea of the purpose of education, which, for him was to transmit from one generation to the next the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the society, and to prepare the young people for their future membership of the society and their active participation in its maintenance or development. I then suggested that traditional communities of old paid serious attention to this important area of their responsibilities within the scope of the resources—tangible and intangible—available to them. And I suggested that we must ask ourselves a pertinent question: “how have our contemporary societies fared with regard to the discharge of this grave responsibility?” Today, I deal with this question.

    Let me first try to explain and defend the view that traditional societies paid attention to the responsibility to educate, which again, is simply preparing the young people that society brings into its world for meaningful membership of the society and for active participation in its maintenance and development.

    Whatever little doubt there is about the theory of a fundamental selfishness in the motivation of individuals and societies for wanting children and bringing them into the world is removed if we pay close attention to the very idea of reproduction, which connotes the act of producing again the same entity. We want to reproduce ourselves because we crave immortality. Bina ba ku a feeru boju. Bogede ku a fomo e ropo. Death must not be final; there must be continuity. This was and still is the understanding of traditional communities. This is why individual families and communities at large would always place a premium on preparing their young for their future membership of the society so they can carry on; so families and communities do not suffer extinction.

    The preparation of the young, which is what education is about, takes different forms but with the same goal and objective. Thus families prepare their young to take over the traditional role that the family is identified with in the community. Music making, crafts making, hunting guild, and healing are activities for which particular families are known and the children of such families just grow into the activities and thus maintain the horizontal division of labor within the society.

    A second but complimentary approach to preparing the young is the transmission of the family’s and society’s values of the dignity of labor, honesty, self-respect and dependability. No family wants its family name put to shame through the actions of any of its sons and daughters. Preparing the young for membership of the society is arming them against the disease of shamelessness. Note that preparation for the acquisition of material possession has nothing to do with this philosophy of education. The major goal is for the values of society to be transmitted and sustained, that everyone is empowered to make meaningful contributions to the society, and that the society is thereby primed for perpetuity.

    The foregoing enables us to understand why none of the samplers of our traditional communities boasted of overly rich or overly poor people. And in none of those societies did we ever have loafers and idlers. This is not romanticism. There was the full engagement of every member of the traditional communities in one form of activity or another. That was the outcome of the system of traditional education. Thus, unless during festivals, it would be very unusual to behold a sea of heads in the central square of any traditional village community, roaming about aimlessly and hopelessly.

    Ponder then over the present condition of our downtowns, inner cities and urban communities and ask yourself the question: “how have our contemporary societies fared in the grave responsibility of preparing the young for meaningful membership of the society and for its maintenance and development?” And the answer is not in doubt: Our contemporary record has been woeful and absolutely not comparable with the achievements of traditional society in the education of the young.

    Surely, we cannot compare apples and oranges, it might be argued. The world of traditional society was/is parochial and closed, with little or no ambition. The transformation of that world into the modern nation-state is something to appreciate and celebrate. But with that transformation come the difficulties of reconciling different outlooks and mobilising opposing forces. The fact that our own particular mode of transformation was mediated by foreign forces, which had little to no regard for the antecedent value orientation did not help matters. Indeed, it may be noted that, through the instrumentalities of those foreign forces, we moved away from the traditional notion of education as preparation for meaningful membership in society to one that emphasises the goal of individual advancement.

    I am not persuaded by the kind of defence of failure that is represented in the preceding paragraph. The point is this: whether we accept the traditional conception of education as preparation of the young for a meaningful membership in the society or we affirm the so-called foreign mediated version that sees education as the promotion of individual advancement, our contemporary efforts have failed to produce results. We have failed to prepare the majority of our young for meaningful membership of society and we have not quite succeeded in putting the majority of them on the ladder of individual advancement. In fact, I don’t see a serious conflict between the two conceptions. A young person that is successfully prepared for individual advancement does not thereby stop being a meaningful member of society provided he or she is not ego-centric or ego-driven.

    The caveat just entertained is the crux of the matter. There is a shortsighted mentality that views individual advancement in clearly egocentric terms and it is represented in the majority of those who took over from the foreign forces. To this group, the good of the self takes precedence over the good of the whole and their educational policies reflect this mindset. That was why even in our nation, it took the courage and foresightedness of only one regional leader to uphold and argue the view that human beings are the most important resource and must be the subject of societal and national investment so they can become meaningful members of society.

    This philosophical position was then combined with a visionary planning that ensures that the policy of Universal Free Primary Education (UFPE) was successful. Teacher training, schools construction and classroom space were prioritised. Additionally provision was made for the products of the UFPE to proceed to post primary institutions with the establishment of secondary modern schools and technical and trade schools. This was why the phenomenon of area boys was a rare occurrence in the fifties and sixties.

    That vision has only been furthered in a few progressive islands that dot the ocean of intellectual and political stupor that makes up our national existence. And it is not a surprise that our young ones are hopeless and aimless. We brought them into the world without a plan for their becoming meaningful members of society. We don’t seem to have a clue as to how to make provision for the masses of drop outs from every level of the system so they don’t become useless to themselves. And the ones that make it through the systems become despondent because they have no jobs and they have no means of self-employment. Until we come to the realisation that the nation must educate its public for meaningful existence, we will continue to live with the consequences of our collective denial.

     

     

  • The world’s best

    The world’s best

    Greatness of a nation is invariably determined not by those who govern her but by the use to which the ordinary citizens of such a nation put their endowed talents and skills. No nation can ever be great in the absence of her citizens. As a matter of fact, nothing is called a nation without the people who inhabit the landmass of the concerned area and deploy their skills for the development of its resources. In a nutshell, it is the combined greatness of individual citizens that often constitutes the greatness of any nation. That is why all responsible governments encourage citizens of their countries to strive for lofty heights in all field of human endeavour. Ironically, however, while some nations become great because of their citizens’ skills, others remain static because of their governments’ inaction. Nigeria belongs to the latter. But despite the continuous inaction of her government, this most populous African country luckily continues to enjoy the benefit of international glory often wrought by the personal efforts of her talented citizens.

    Saturday, November 29, 2012 was a unique historic day of glory for Nigeria at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, where the 2012 global Annual Youth Conference was held. Two special themes were chosen for the conference which is generally known as Annual Youth Assembly (AYA). One of those themes is ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (MDG). The other is ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDG). The main objective of AYA is to encourage some focused world youths to exhibit their intellectual prowess in proffering solutions to contemporary and future global challenges. It is organised at the instance of the ‘Friendship Ambassadors Foundation’ (FAF).

    Present at the November 2012 conference were some shakers and movers of global events from all parts of the world including permanent representatives of the various countries at the United Nations. They clustered the venue of the conference like a galaxy of stars waiting to usher the world’s most ingenuous leaders of tomorrow into today’s Hall of Fame with a chorus of KUDOS! The event was beamed live to virtually all parts of the world through various TV Cable Networks. The historic announcement of the winners which climaxed the one week event was greeted with a thunderous applause and overwhelming ovation. Out of the 700 hundred contestants from more than 70 countries of the world, three best winners emerged at the occasion. One of them was from Africa. Another was from Asia while the third was from South America. When the glorious moment of announcing the very best of the three finalists came, a grave but anxious silence descended on the hall. This was followed by a lone baritone voice that announced thus: “…..And the winner is RAHMAH ADERINOYE FROM NIGERIA!!!!! The audience roared into an unprecedented ecstasy of jubilation hugging and shaking hands with one another just as the chanting of CONGRATULATIONS rented the air for several minutes with songs of joy. Rahmah had beaten the two other finalists from China and Haiti to the second and third positions respectively. It was indeed, a rare moment of glory for a comatose country like Nigeria dangling ceaselessly like a pendulum with a noose on the altar of dysfunction. History was made once again by a Nigerian for Nigeria but without an input from the latter. An unfortunate incident at that moment, however, was the conspicuous absence of any official from Nigeria. While all other participants were officially accompanied and supported by the representatives of their countries, as usual, no notable Nigerian official representative was there. Unlike what obtains in focused countries, Nigeria does not attach any importance to assisting or supporting her own citizens in making any glory of that sort. As a country, she prefers to proclaim any individual who, out of personal effort, makes glory as her worthy citizen. And that preference was demonstrated again at the 2012 AYA conference. That Nigeria was not officially represented on such a glorious occasion cannot be a surprise to anybody who knows this country very well. After all, a similar incident occurred in March 1987 when a onetime Grand Qadi of Northern Nigeria, the late Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi won the prestigious King Faisal Award just six months after Wole Soyinka won Nobel Laurel in September 1986. And while the foreign press was celebrating the honour days and nights, the same Federal Government which sent a powerful delegation to accompany Wole Soyinka to Stockholm (in Sweden) six months earlier remained nonchalant. It took yours sincerely to write on the matter severally (then in The Concord) pointing out the government’s hypocrisy and religious bias before something could be done at the federal level. And by the time the then General Ibrahim Babangida-led government decided half-heartedly to congratulate Sheikh Gumi and accept to play a role, all arrangements had been privately completed by the late Bashorun MKO Abiola who volunteered to bear the entire cost.

    It was he (Abiola) who invited about 200 eminent Nigerians to form a delegation which was to accompany Sheikh Gumi to Riyadh, (the Saudi Arabian capital) where the award was to be given. He also provided their travelling tickets and Basic Travelling Allowance (BTA) even as he chartered the Jumbo Jet that conveyed them. The then government only stepped in belatedly following my series of articles and that was on the suspicion that Bashorun Abiola might use the event to score a political point. Thus, if we have a government in place today which repeated such episode by choosing to be indifferent to the great honour won for Nigeria by Rahmah; it should not be a surprise. The sadistic tradition has long been established. Thank God, however, that the name of this brilliant future leader did not come up at that level in connection with cocaine pushing or human trafficking which would have automatically attracted the attention of our government and Nigerian Press. The 1987 episode is recalled here because yours sincerely was on the two mentioned (Stockholm and Riyal) delegations.

    Who is Rahmah Aderinoye?

    The common question on the lips of most people who witnessed the 2012 MDG event and which may also become the main question from many readers of this column is the one above. Who is Rahmah Aderinoye? And the answer to that question is not far-fetched. Rahmah Adebodun Aderinoye is a tender female University student with the heart of a brave male. She is the fifth and last child of her parents but also the fourth daughter. Her natural visage betrays her intellectual mien. In appearance, she looks half her father and half her mother an indication that she cuts a chip of each of the two parents. Rahmah Aderinoye, a Nigerian student of Biology at the University of Texas (USA), is vigorously proving to be a sucker rather than a bud in her family tree. And like any potent sucker, her burning desire is to outgrow the stem and foliages of that consanguine tree without minding any local tradition accorded her gender. Her pedigree is strong, no doubt, but her towering surge is independent of that pedigree as she charts her course ahead with little expectation of any assistance from any particular individual. She has caught a niche for herself in a world where even older adults refuse to be weaned from their parental ladle. Born to Professor Rasheed and Hajia Biqis Aderinoye in Ibadan about 23 years ago and christened Rahmah (meaning Blessing) this courageous young woman is truly becoming a universal blessing not only to her parents or her country but also to African continent as well as the global Muslim Ummah. Already, without prompting, she has chosen to be an Ambassador Plenipotentiary for her fatherland as she flies the latter’s green-white-green flag loftily and admirably at the international level without asking the forbidden question of ‘what can my country do for me?. By all means, Rahmah epitomises the new dream generation with a life ambition to put Nigeria on the special map of success story. Now a final year biology student at the University of Texas, Arlington, USA, Rahmah had her elementary education at the University of Ibadan Staff School and her secondary education at the International School, UI, Ibadan before proceeding to South Carolina University from where she moved to the University of Texas on scholarship.

    What qualified her for this laurel?

    Motivated by a burning desire to give a helping hand to fellow Nigerians in alleviating the crushing poverty and squalor in the land, Rahmah established a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) named ‘Youth for Intellectual Interaction Initiative (YIII) with more than 20 volunteers in Nigeria, United Kingdom and the US. It was this NGO that she used in applying for participation in the 2012 MDG project that fetched her the glorious laurel that now makes her a global star. And with that laurel she has automatically become a ‘Fellow of (UN) Resolution’. Already, she has been commissioned by UNICEF to develop and work on a concept to empower the vulnerable youths in Africa an assignment which she sees as a veritable opportunity to further propel the African youths into continental development through a deserving renaissance. Thus, she is a UNICEF global Ambassador.

    Shortly before the announcement of the results of the competition, Rahmah called her father on phone to inform him of her nervousness having been overwhelmed by the galaxy of other contestants. But in response, her father, an experienced professor of education, told her to calm down saying: “I won’t be surprised if you win”. And when the event was over, she made the following confession: ‘So, when my name was announced, I became frightened and was shaking. Three winners emerged at the end of the day from three continents (Asia, Africa and South America) and these were a Nigerian, a Chinese and a Haitian. I was proudly thrilled to represent Nigeria at the Youth Assembly at the UN. For me, participating in that Social Challenge Venture was pretty exciting but it involved a lot of work. I had to submit some drafts before presenting my project in front of over 700 delegates from the world and face the judges and the crowd. I was really, really nervous…” Throwing light on the real nature of the competition, she said: “At the annual youth assembly, Resolution Project looks at youthful students in colleges, asks them to present a problem peculiar to their localities and suggest possible solutions to such a problem. If the proposal is accepted, the project then gives both mentoring and financial assistance to help them bring about the solution they proposed.” She continued: “I was supposed to pick a problem staring Nigerians in the face and propose a solution to it. So the problem I chose was poverty which is the number one set goal of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. I proposed empowerment through skills acquisition. This means that I will basically be empowering people in some vocations thereby making them self-sufficient and ultimately working towards the set goals of the UN. Thus, the solution I proposed was empowerment through skills acquisition.”

    Narrating her planned approach to tackling poverty especially in Africa, Rahmah said: “The best approach to tackling poverty as far as I am concerned is to train people in some vocations, stressing that “what we will be doing is training people in some vocations such as baking, bead making, farming, tailoring and some couple of others but it’s going to be one vocation at a time. Now, after these people are trained, we will provide them with basic materials they need to start up and that way, they can start making money for themselves.” Asked to state specifically what she will now be doing as a Fellow of (UN) Resolution and UNICEF Ambassador the 23 year old eloquent student of Biology said: “I presently volunteer with UNICEF USA to raise funds and create awareness for various projects. Recently, for instance, I led a number of fellow youths in the US to raise funds for the Children of Syria who are being subjected to all sorts of abuse and insecurity of life. We were trying to get more relief materials for them in their various refugee camps. And now, I am working on what is called Zero Project. It is estimated that about 19,000 children die daily of preventable causes and this figure comes from just five countries in the world. Sadly, Nigeria happens to be one of them. “At UNICEF, USA, we believe that number can be reduced to ZERO. For this reason we raise funds to be invested in the affected countries and we shall continue to do so until we get to ZERO level. As for her future plans this is what Rahmah has to say: I want to complete my undergraduate studies at the end of the current academic session and start post graduate studies. Also, I am planning to go ahead with my project in Nigeria if only as a fulfillment of my dream of bringing zero project to my country alongside my proposed solution at the United Nations. So I need every Nigerian to team up with me and my teammates in this initiative.”

    When ‘THE MESSAGE’ asked Rahmah’s father to comment on his daughter’s performance he simply said “I am highly impressed Alhamdu Lillah”. Professor Aderinoye, a Professor of Education at the University of Ibadan who is currently the Deputy Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) however explained that he earlier entertained fear about the project because his daughter started it when her examination was approaching. But she assured him that she would cope.

    Perhaps if Osun, the ‘State of Integrity’ had not been Rahmah’s indigenous state, nothing would have been heard about her great achievement from any government circle in Nigeria. It was the State of Osun alone that officially invited her for the establishment of a branch of her NGO in that state and provided an office for it. The state government, represented by the Commissioner for Youths and Women Affairs, Mrs. Folake Adegboyega and the Senior Special Adviser to the Governor on Youth and Women Empowerment, Mr. Abdullah Binuyo also sponsored the launching of the NGO. And such is quite in line with Osun State’s policy of youth empowerment.

    Lesson to learn

    For parents who discriminate in the training of their children, this is a lesson. Rahmah is the fifth and last child of her parents. Only one of those children is a male. And all of them are doing as fantastically well in their respective callings as the only male child among them. What else does any sensible person want in a child? More than 90 per cent of Nigerian problems are currently caused by male children. And on the contrary, it is female children who take care of their parents better in old age. Besides, isn’t it ingratitude to Allah on the part of those who think parochially that male children are better than female children? That is a food for thought. We pray the Almighty Allah to prolong and protect the life of Rahmah Aderinoye with further guidance and blessings even as we implore Allah to give our Ummah many more of her type. Amin.

  • Ethics, education and community

    Ethics, education and community

    Today I start a series of reflections on what I consider the foundation of a progressive society: the education of the public or public education. I think it is fair to say that the future of any community or nation is going to be determined by the attention it pays to and the resources it provides for the education of its members from the cradle to the grave. If the preceding reasoning is true, then education of the public is also a matter of ethics. First, if we bring children into the world, we have a moral responsibility to educate them so they have a meaningful life experience. Second, educating its public is in the interest of any community that prioritises peaceable living and development. And there is a general consensus among thoughtful people that if a community gets right the priority of educating its members, it can be assured of the addition of all other good things of life.

    I just argued the point that the education of its public is a matter of ethics for any community. But I have not shown, it may be pointed out, why a community should bother about ethics or morality. Indeed, why do we need to worry about shared moral beliefs or moral rules? Why can’t individuals create their own rules and play by it or even refuse to follow their own rules in a consistent fashion? I think many of us would protest the sense of this question because it appears to ignore the reality of our times. Many people, especially the highly placed, now create their own rules and don’t necessarily play by them unless they are assured of benefits for themselves. The point, however, is that even those individuals would be first to advocate common moral rules because it is not in their interest if everyone were to imitate them.

    Without proper communal standards of conduct, anarchy is bound to prevail. And where anarchy prevails, individual survival or progress is jeopardised. But if proper communal standards are essential to avoid anarchy, it should also be recognised that proper communal standards of conduct require shared moral beliefs. These are trying times for decent human living. The fact that there is so much trouble around us point to the absence of adequate moral values.

    We are witnessing the negative impact of the erosion of shared moral beliefs and standards across the land. It is not just in terms of divergent religious or ethnic values. Indeed, deep down their roots, every religious or traditional value system has important shared beliefs about the sanctity of life, about the good of communal living, about the care of the offspring. And communities still survive and make progress because the majority of their members accept and respect the primacy of moral values and principles. Morality is an internalised private cop, which if completely abandoned will spell doom for all. In spite of the odds, we still have generalised shared values about the wrongness of kidnapping and armed robbery just as we do about the immorality of corruption.

    The more insidious agent of moral and value conflict has to do with the inequalities caused by disparities in access to good education. In the normative sense, education refers to two—narrow and broad—processes. In the narrow sense, we may see education as the process of bringing up the youth, training and instructing them for particular—whatever—ends. Broadly, it is the development of a person’s awareness, the transformation and regulation of emotions, wants, and attitudes. To be educated in this sense means more than to be trained for a job. It is to be brought up for good citizenship.

    Education is a value; an educated person is an improved person and the end-product of an educational system is a desirable product. Education, in this sense, prepares one for a wholesome life and for living well, which does not necessarily mean materially well. Obviously, then, formal institutions of learning have a role to play in providing education in this sense but there is much more to it than formal institutions are capable of offering. In any case, a community or nation must come to terms with this sense of education because it is its most important resource as a social force.

    Let me suggest the following syllogism: To educate is to improve; every human person needs to be improved; hence every human person needs to be educated. I think there is a very important sense in which this is true. But there is one caveat or two. First, it has also been suggested that education can dehumanise in which case it does not improve because it cannot be both. We may deal with this by making a distinction between genuine and fake education, what Carter G. Woodson once referred to as mis-education. While genuine education improves, mis-education dehumanises.

    A second caveat has to do with the second premise of the syllogism: every human person needs to be improved. The question is by whom? And the answer is by self and the community. Self-improvement is certainly an obligation that everyone has to bear responsibility for. “I have been made; I will have to remake myself” is an important traditional axiom. But we know that the human being is wholly dependent at birth and this extends to the first seventeen to eighteen years of life. Some can gain independence earlier but not without enormous and debilitating struggle the scars of which sometimes permanently impair future development and progress. Therefore from infancy to adolescence every human person needs a community of fellow human beings to take responsibility for his or her education.

    The community has a genuine interest in educating its public to avoid a degeneration of its existence. Mwalimu Nyerere’s sagacious reasoning in this matter is instructive: The purpose of education, he observes, is to transmit from one generation to the next the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the society, and to prepare the young people for their future membership of the society and their active participation in its maintenance or development. Traditional communities paid serious attention to this important area of their responsibilities within the scope of the resources—tangible and intangible—available to them. The question we must ask ourselves is “how have our contemporary societies fared with regard to the discharge of this grave responsibility?” This will be the focus of attention next week.