Category: Editorial

Education minister’s move to ask SSS to distribute books indicts his stewardship and UBEC 

The serious role education plays in the nation’s development has highlighted the clamour by stakeholders for not only increase in the budget to the sector but also an uptick in the quality of personnel and robustness of policy.

We have consistently witnessed decline at every level from the primary pupil to the tertiary student. Our universities, at one time, showed leadership and immense promise not only in Africa but other parts of the world. Today, the so-called marquee institutions have no mention in the top 100 or barely a mention even in the top 1,000 around the world.

At the formative years, the kindergarten kids and the primary school pupils have enthusiasm not rewarded by the erudition of teachers or the force of equipment. Many stumble in the rudiments of arithmetic and wobble in the tenses and syntax of the English language. Some of the seeming best abound in rote. So what we have is a generation after generation of wasted minds birthing a perilous future.

Yet huge sums are announced year after year as budgetary allocations to education. Those who know say those sums are trifle compared to the challenges. But others say if only a sizeable percentage of the announced sums actually reach the sector, we shall pray less than our desperation forces on us today on the decline of the classroom.

A news report had it that the Federal Ministry of Education has enlisted the State Security Service (SSS) to distribute books to the 774 local government areas in the country. What this means is that the minister, Ezenwo Nyesom Wike, has lost faith in the traditional government agencies that did the job. Principal among them is the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC).

In his appeal to the SSS chief, Ekpeyong Ita, the minister said: “We urge you to help us check the leakages and sabotage in the distribution chain. We have come here to give you the list of the distribution of textbooks and library resource materials to the states for the next phase to begin in November to ensure that the books get to the end users.”

This is a very unfortunate development. This is not the sort of assignment that the SSS should embark on at a time when our security is fragile and their personnel are supposed to hunker down in the underbelly of Boko Haram and states in the Niger Delta and south east where kidnappers are building a network of tyranny.

It is also an indictment of UBEC, which is the agency that should do the task now being assigned to the security service. The minister also announced that Niger State successfully prosecuted three State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) officials. This shows that there is a fundamental problem with the way UBEC does its job and rather than face the challenge and root it out, the minister has surrendered. That is why he is finding refuge with the SSS.

Clearly, distribution and the math of book and education resource distribution are problematic. Earlier this year, the president announced staggering sums deployed for the spread of books across the local governments in the country. According to the reports, N16.6 billion was spent on the purchase of textbooks and education resource materials in 2010 and 2011. For 2010, N10 billion was spent to procure 24.5 million books. Two questions arise from this. One, where are the books? If we had as many as 24.5 million books in the country, there will be no clamour for books. Parents would not be spending so much on books. Who are the publishers? Where are the records as to where the books went to and who received them? These are important questions.

Apart from the geographic imperatives of the books, what of the math? If 24.5 million books cost N10 billion, it means by simple math that an average of about N408,000 was spent per book. What books cost so much? Not even medical books get so prohibitive, and those are for the university. But the books in question are for basic education. This is nothing short of a scandal. Did the publishers inflate the cost of the books or this was just a case of taking advantage of the budget? Or is it the case of manipulation of figures still mysterious to a naïve public? It is curious that President Goodluck Jonathan also rolled out these figures earlier this year but did not seem to chew the mathematical inconsistencies.

Education is too important a matter to be left in the hands of bureaucrats or politicians not aware of the implications for the quality of life of the coming generations. That the minister has taken refuge in the SSS is a cowardly escape from tackling the real issue: rottenness in the ministry and UBEC.

Professor Omoruyi’s predicament is a cautionary tale on the transience of influence

Every now and then, situations arise which bring to the fore the need for individuals to ensure that they always remember that what they do today could haunt them tomorrow. Such is the case of the celebrated public intellectual, Omo Omoruyi. A Professor of Political Science, Omoruyi was a prominent member of the brains trust of ex-military President Ibrahim Babangida.

This distinguished intellectual has, apparently, fallen on hard times. After contracting cancer and having to undertake extensive treatment, Professor Omoruyi discovered that the disease was not in remission as he had thought. Due to the prohibitively expensive nature of treatment in the United States, he had been seeking assistance from the powerful friends that he was so useful to when he was in government.

Unfortunately for him, those friends, including individuals like Babangida, have apparently turned a deaf ear to his cries for help. According to Omoruyi, his efforts to get in contact with the current Head of State, President Goodluck Jonathan have been thwarted by shadowy political figures who seem to be intent on getting their revenge for perceived offences.

This is truly an unfortunate situation for Omoruyi. As Director-General of the Centre for Democratic Studies (CDS), he led high-level scholarly enquiry into many of the political challenges confronting the country. While many of the schemes hatched at the CDS helped Babangida to perfect his convoluted political transition programme, Omoruyi can certainly be credited for helping to fashion out the much-lauded “Option A 4”, the system of voting that led to the landmark presidential election of June 12, 1993, which has been widely adjudged to be the fairest in the country’s history.

Omoruyi was also a staunch defender of many of the actions taken by the Babangida administration when it was in power. No matter how seemingly contradictory its policies were, regardless of how self-serving many of its decrees appeared to be, individuals like Omoruyi were always on hand to proffer comprehensive explanations justifying those actions and policies.

It is possible that the Professor’s ideological change of heart after Babangida’s exit from power is part of the reason for the cold shoulder that he has allegedly received from the powerful politicians with whom he was once friendly. If there is one quality valued by influential people, it is loyalty; it is what ensures that reliability is not predicated upon whether one is in office or not.

Omoruyi’s predicament is a warning to those technocrats and professionals who are in public positions today. In Nigeria, many of them seem to be content with singing the praises of the master when he or she is in office, only to denounce them the moment they are no longer there. While such moral flexibility may bring material rewards, it only damages the reputation of those who indulge in such a strategy. No matter one’s level of educational attainment, moral character must be seen to complement great learning.

A person who commits himself or herself to probity, uprightness and the truth when in a position of public responsibility ensures that he or she is not doomed to suffer disappointment or rejection out of office. Powerful patrons come and go; character and integrity are everlasting. As Professor Omoruyi battles with his medical challenges, it is to be hoped that he comes through them a better person and a stronger man.

• Patty Obassey, the inimitable gospel musician and gentleman, passes away unsung

And so Patty passes on, his last days marked by dereliction, penury and acute renal trauma. A condition he fought without much help from the society he has left a bounty of soulful music and healthful songs. Patty transited lying on the blanket of misery as the world would not remit to him, the love he so showered through his numerous songs.

Also known as ‘The Sower’, Patty Obassey who is most remembered for that popular track, Nwa Mammy Water released in the ‘80s passed on losing a protracted battle against kidney failure. He was reported to have given up the ghost in his Enugu residence on Friday morning, having slipped into unconsciousness earlier that day. As reports have it, his was nearly a year-long tryst as his two kidneys were said to have failed. He was recommended for a transplant operation in India but that was not to be as he could not raise the minimum N10million required for the purpose. Newspapers quoted a female relative of the deceased to have said: “Brother died in his house this morning and his body had been deposited in the mortuary. He could not go for the kidney transplant in India as recommended by his doctor at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, UNTH, Enugu.”

Patty who hailed from Mmaku in Agwu Local Government Area of Enugu State was known for the sonority and pious beauty he brought to gospel music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Apart from the very popular Nwa Mammy Water which brought him fame, he had strings of other hits like B’anu K’anyi kele Jehovah, Roputara nu onwe unu, and Onaputa wom, to name just a few. Singing in Igbo language, the gentle tenor of his voice and rich Christian message was remarkably different from the usually noisy dance music that gospel has turned to. Patty who was a clergy man truly sought to minister to his audience through the instrumentality of his music, deriving most of his songs straight from the Bible.

In more developed countries, Patty would have been very comfortable if not wealthy going by the number of ‘hits’ he released in his heyday as a gospel musician. He would have continued to earn royalties from the exposure of his music and income from the sale of his albums. But not so here. Music is aired in the electronic media and in public places with nary a dime of royalty paid and the minute a song is released, ‘pirates’ descend on it and flood the markets with it, debarring the creator of the work from enjoying the fruit of his labour. It is one of the numerous problems of under-development still plaguing the country. Though a number of agencies have been set up to combat intellectual rights violation, most of them have remained buried under the rubbles of the problems they are created to solve. This explains why an artiste of Patty’s calibre would end up in such penury and mendicant state.

For nearly one year, Patty solicited for help to seek medical aid abroad to no avail. Not from the generality of Nigerians, not from the people of the Southeast where his music was popular, not from the musicians association and not even from the Enugu State Government to which we are aware, a special appeal was made to help Patty live. Patty was an icon and a worthy ambassador of Enugu State. He did not deserve such shabby fate; rather, he deserved to have been given a chance to live.

Patty’s passage reiterates three quick lessons for us to learn: the need to respect intellectual property right, the need to nurture a compassionate society and the need to fix our health system so that we are not always faced with the option of ‘you either go to India or die’. Fare thee well ‘The Sower’, though you seem to have passed on unsung, we will continue to find solace in your evergreen, ever soothing songs.

DOES IT make sense for Scotland to become an independent nation, ending 300 years of union with England and Wales? And would it make any difference to Americans?

The answer to the second question is an unfortunate yes: An independent Scotland would significantly weaken the foremost military and diplomatic ally of the United States, while creating another European mini-state unable to contribute meaningfully to global security. Scottish leader Alex Salmond, who on Oct. 15 sealed an agreement with British Prime Minister David Cameron to hold a referendum on Scottish independence by the end of 2014, says his would-be country would withdraw from NATO, expel British nuclear submarines from its waters and keep an army of 8,000-10,000 soldiers. Though the population of Scotland, at 5.2 million, is less than 10 percent of that of the United Kingdom, some speculate that what remained of Britain could lose its seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Whether Scotland would benefit from separation is a closer call; but for now, polls show that most Scots don’t think so. Mr. Salmond’s cheerful assurances that Scotland could quickly join the European Union while retaining the British pound as its currency remain to be tested; London would have a veto over both. EU states might demand that Scotland commit to the wobbly Euro; if the pound were split between two nations, it could become subject to the same troubles that have afflicted the European currency.

Scotland’s viability as an independent state would depend on its ability to monopolize revenues from Britain’s North Sea oil fields; the left-leaning Scottish National Party envisions a social democratic welfare state, like Norway. But its claims that 90 percent of North Sea oil and gas would belong to the country would also be contested. Some say England would retain up to a third of the fields.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who strongly opposes the split, may have managed to undermine the movement when he refused to allow a second referendum question on greater Scottish autonomy within Britain — the option that most of the population seems to favor. But Scottish separatism is not yet dead — Mr. Salmond is a formidable campaigner — and it is part of a worrying trend. Across Europe, prosperous regions with distinct ethnic, linguistic or historic identities are contemplating independence, from Catalonia in Spain to Flanders in Belgium and Venice in Italy.

What makes such fragmentation conceivable, ironically, is the European Union, which offers Scots, Catalans and others the prospect of remaining part of a big common market while keeping more of their wealth for themselves. Like small U.S. states, European statelets could command disproportionate representation in EU bodies; today’s provincial politicians imagine themselves seated alongside Germany and France at European summits.

To be sure, a more local government can be more efficient, more democratic and more attuned to citizens’ interests. But the more fragmented Europe becomes, the less it will be able to use its collective strength on the global stage, both in military and diplomatic terms. Though a weak EU diplomatic corps exists, a bona fide continental military is a distant dream, at best. A weaker Europe means a less stable world, and less leverage for the democracies.

– Washington Post