The thing caught in Nte’s trap is bigger than Nte – Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
By far the biggest news out of Abuja this past week is easily the special retreat on education by President Buhari and his cabinet. Controversially, Mallam Nassir El Rufai, the Governor of Kaduna State, had sacked hundreds of primary schoolteachers for gross incompetency and in the aftermath of the crisis caused by this action, Buhari not only lent his support to El Rufai, he also indicated that the problem applied far beyond Kaduna State to the whole nation and its primary and secondary educational sectors and required an appropriate response from his administration, the first expression of which was the retreat. And to start off the retreat, Buhari gave a speech to his ministers that will surely strike many as being on the same level of seriousness and perspicacity as the speeches he gave early in the life of his administration on the need for a total war against corruption. Obviously, this was why the speech was released to the public and published in full at the same time that the occurrence of the retreat was made known to the nation.
Obviously then, the president intends this to be another battle, another warfront. Definitely, this view has been expressed by the first set of commentators on the president’s educational retreat speech. Considering this fact, I suggest that if indeed this is another warfront of the president and his administration, it is both logical and necessary for us to apply some lessons from Buhari and the APC’s stalled war on corruption to this new theatre of war that is a battle against educational decay in our country. This is the subject of this piece and to argue my case, I will identify three lessons from mistakes committed in the ongoing war against corruption that, in my opinion, should be applied to this new battle front if the mistakes and their effects are not to be repeated. What are these effects? Bitter disappointments, crippling reversals of expectations and the dashing of hopes of millions of our peoples.
To go directly into the discussion in this piece, permit me to briefly identify the three lessons from the mistakes on the war on corruption that I have hinted before getting into a full or suggestive elaboration of each of the lessons. First then, there is the question of the complete misdiagnosis of the spread of the cancer of corruption in our country by Buhari and his administration. Cancer may be cancer, but some cancers are more virulent, more widely spread than others. For instance, it is known that in comparison with the deadly virulence of cancers of the pancreas and the colon, cancer of the prostate is relatively benign, especially when caught early. The Buhari administration, we now know, went after the cancer of corruption as if it was one of the milder and etiologically more benign cancers, only to find out, hopefully not too late, that it was dealing with the mother of all cancers.
The second lesson is no less serious and portentous, it being the grievous lack of training and experience of the surgeons and physicians that Buhari deployed against the cancer of corruption. To push our medical analogies further, this is very much like placing a cancer patient under the supervisory expertise of a physician whose specialty is either cosmetic surgery or dentistry. The worst expression of this error is – Buhari himself, followed closely by his Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami. For readers who might think that this is too harsh, too intemperate and unfair to the President and the AGF, please consider the fact that in the last two years, we have been treated to the spectacle of a president and his chief law officer who are so ill-prepared, so arrogantly unfit for the tasks they set themselves in the war against corruption that they have been completely incapable of learning from their mistakes, the ultimate proof of which is – Mainagate. Yes, the President did appoint a Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC) and placed it under the direction of Professor Itse Sagay whose ability, competence and dedication are unquestionable, but when the superintending physicians themselves are of the order of cosmetic surgeons, there odds are already stacked against the survival of the patient.
Thirdly and finally, there is the error, the blindness of excluding the participation of the actual and potential victims of the deadly cancer of corruption – the Nigerian peoples in their millions in every part of the land – in the healing, curative process. Here, we must admit the relative complicity of the patients, the Nigerian peoples themselves, in their exclusion from participation in the battle against the cancer of corruption. True, collective anti-corruption coalitions like SERAP have been commendable in their active support of the administration’s war against corruption, but their efforts have not been sufficient enough to make too much of a difference. And to be completely candid on this point, I do not think their strategy and tactics have been well-tuned enough to mobilize the Nigerian masses to claim and own the war against corruption. And indeed, on this point, I cannot but extend this critique to myself: far away in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the larger part of the year and confined mostly to the page of this column as an index of my “participation”, how much have I myself contributed to the efforts to bring the masses into the war against corruption?
With regard to the applicability of lesson number one to the new front of a war against educational decay in our country, think of the fact that it is a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem not to see that the alarming mediocrity that has been identified in teachers in primary and secondary schools exists also in the universities and polytechnics at the tertiary level of our educational system. In other words, who can deny that the cancer of educational decay has spread very wide and has infected all the levels and gradations of our educational order? As a matter of fact, I would argue that the cancer started at the top of the system in the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education and from there moved to the midsections in the secondary schools, going from there to the primary schools. Of course, each level has its own peculiarities, its own manifestations of the malady. Let me be very precise on this crucial point: certified but barely literate teachers are more easily detected in primary schools than in universities, but can we not see that lecturers and professors that produce certified university graduates, many of them with first class degrees, that are deemed “unemployable”, are in the same rut as the teachers sacked by the Kaduna State Governor? But can mediocre and unqualified lecturers and professors be as easily exposed as mediocre teachers of primary and secondary schools? The answer is a definite and resounding no. But does this mean that they cannot and should never be exposed? Again, the answer is no on both counts. A state governor, the Federal Minister of Education or for that matter, the President himself – none of them can simply descend on a state or federal university, administer simple tests to lecturers and professors to expose the mediocrities among them and proceed to give them the boot. This cannot, and will not, and should not happen. But something must happen, compatriots! In these extremely difficult questions we see the need to avoid the misdiagnosis that has haunted and undermined Buhari and the APC’s war on corruption.
The preceding point leads us directly to the second lesson from the mistakes of the war on corruption – the error of placing a cancer patient under the “skill” of a dentist or cosmetic surgeon. Let me be direct and unambiguous, almost to the point of bluntness here: ministers and bureaucrats, and even the president himself, cannot, on their own, identify and deal with the grave intellectual and qualitative shortcomings in our tertiary institutions. Primarily, the task, the burden must fall on the lecturers and professors themselves. But can they and will they do what is right, what is necessary? My answer to this question is a qualified yes. I base this partly on my experience of having taught in two major Nigerian universities and partly on my having once served as the National President of ASUU (1980-82). Physician, heal thyself! This famous adage has for a long time, silently and subliminally, been operative in the Nigerian university system. The number of workshops, the number of conferences and seminars that have been held on the topic is quite literally staggering. Of course, not all the findings, not all the deliberations and reports will be found useful, but there is no doubt at all that this treasure trove can be a starting basis for deciding how best to take on the challenge of eradicating decay and mediocrity from our tertiary educational system.
Let me remind the reader of the third lesson from the mistakes of the war on corruption: not excluding the Nigerian peoples, the Nigerian masses, from active participation, indeed active “ownership” of the healing, corrective, transformative process. Luckily, in any meaningful and concerted war against educational decay in our country, a whole range of stakeholders and interested parties can be counted upon to wade in mightily if they are asked, if they are mobilized to do so: parents and guardians; teachers and counsellors; would-be employers and non-governmental organizations. Parents who save all their earnings to send their children to universities abroad would be profoundly gratified if the quality of instruction and learning available in our universities rise to match and perhaps even outpace what is available in Ghana or South Africa. And who knows but it might come to pass that, as it once was in this country, some or many Nigerian universities might become magnets for attracting and retaining foreign students and lecturers?
Above all else, it is the lesson of misdiagnosis that I deem pivotal. Until I am proved wrong, I doubt that the Buhari administration and the APC as a ruling party are aware of the existence of this particular problem. This is why for the epigraph to this piece, I have the quotation from Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God: “The thing caught by Nte’s trap is bigger than Nte”. Here is an explanation for this quote in the context of the discussion in this essay: Nte’s trap was designed and built for small game that he can handle, that he can easily take possession of from his trap. His trap was not designed and built for animals and game that are bigger than himself, that he cannot not handle. If Nte is wise, he will run to his community and seek help in how to master the unprecedented size and scope of the kill in his trap. If, on the other hand, Nte is unwise and selfishly wary of sharing what his trap has caught with his neighbors, he will act alone; and he will act according to how he has always acted. Governor Nasir El Rufai is the Nte No 1 of the parable. Buhari has picked up the gauntlet from the Kaduna State Governor; he is Nte No 2. Well, at least so far. Let us hope that they will learn from the mistakes of the war on corruption as they embark on the battles ahead in this new front of the battle against rotten, decaying education.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
