There is a trending video on social media. In the video, some disillusioned youth suggested: “Let us give our leaders a mass burial.” Beneath his disillusionment and perceptible scorn, he probably speaks the mind of a greater section of the Nigerian youth – boondocks youth to be precise.
Time will come when the Nigerian ruling class will pay with blood and despair. From six-feet under and grisly jail cells, they will lust for life and desperately seek a second chance with a kind of humble defeatism. Likewise, the Nigerian electorate will pay with greater bloodshed and tragedy, while craving the peace they gobble up as ‘stomach infrastructure’ even as you read.
Every Nigerian yearns for a better tomorrow but we have “today” and fail to make the best of it. Now more than ever, we enumerate that pitiful lack of wisdom and aversion to freedom. Like the ruling class, a greater section of the Nigerian citizenry despise intellect and knowledge – useful knowledge to be precise. Little wonder, the Nigerian family chooses to stand with #Efenation, #Bisolanation, #TBossnation, on Big Brother Nigeria’s perverse reality even as they wish death and interminable bloodshed on our fatherland.
Even if spurred by inexorable courage to topple the elite and change our stars, the Nigerian tragedy will persist in frequency and extent. This is because it is a human tragedy and not a quirk interred in some mythical ‘system.’ After the bones of the last of the ruling class are interred, we shall raise our heads to seek our next best hero only to find none because the survivors will be worse than the interred ruling class.
The average Nigerian is a beast in the closet. Left to his devices, he displays unforgivable inhumaneness and lack of character. Simply put, were our dreams of change realisable, we shall always remain the next awful alternative. Sophistry and deceit are the springboards from which much of our civilization evolve. Add mediocrity, mindlessness and greed, and you have a perfect representation of the Nigerian state.
We were wrong to think it a matter of years and decades that we would improve in citizenship and insight. We pride ourselves on our education but yet remain unaware – like our base and iniquitous elite – that true knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress to both the literate and unschooled.
We forget too that the true essence of learning, that is, both intellectual and vocational learning, is never simply to teach breadwinning, furnish teachers for the public schools or be an epitome of polite society. It should above all be the appendage of that fine adjustment between reality and the growing knowledge of life. An adjustment which discovers the secret of civilization and the solution to its seemingly intractable problems, according to WEB Dubois.
Insanely, to this end, we apply religion and milk it. Thus by every manner of faith, we commit gross inhuman transgressions – like playing God, terrorism, mass murder, inordinate lust for flesh and money.
Today, we lack that broad knowledge of what the world knows and strives to know of progress – which besides food, shelter and clothing is knowledge. Without it, we become basically unequipped and sorely handicapped to satisfy our need for food, shelter and clothing.
Thus the need to evolve and painstakingly propagate practicable knowledge and culture in unexploited and infinite capacity.Until we attain a broad, busy abundance of such understanding, not all the finest flavours of the proverbial national cake – be they oven-baked or sand-baked – can save us from our lusts and the affliction by the Nigerian ruling class.
The knowledge we flaunt is basically a ghost of human education. Sadly, it despises the enlightenment and empowerment of the masses. Thus under its foul stench, we fight a lost battle for survival within the tainted air of politicised corruption, social strife and entrepreneurial selfishness. More significantly, the progress we seek is impeded by our lust for cynicism and delusions of grandeur. We starve and die for lack of honest and broadly cultured men.
Patience, humility, good breeding and taste. Comprehensive high schools and kindergartens, universities and polytechnics, industrial and technical colleges, teacher training colleges, literature, tolerance and tact – all these spring from proper learning and culture.
It’s time we engaged in pursuit and dissemination of knowledge devoid of loose and careless logic, like the type that produced and still produce a good number of the Nigerian electorate and ruling class. And Du Bois intones, the final product of our training must be neither a medical doctor nor journalist but a man. A full man to be precise.
To make such men, our learning process must be replete with ideals as well as broad, pure, practicable and inspiring ends of living. Not desperate, sordid, money-grabbing sound bites. The end product of our educational process must have learnt to work for the glory of his calling, not simply for pecuniary gains. The intellectual must think for truth and progress, not for fame or the applause of the gallery.
All these are attainable via human endeavour and a conscious quest for truth and beneficial knowledge. To bring about such bliss requires the presence of substantially gifted men of courage and culture – a principal prerequisite we seem infinitely handicapped to fulfill. Thus we have shadows of men constituting the Nigerian ruling elite and youth. Consequently, we have learnt to live off the attainments of men of stature accessible now in history and diminishing daguerreotypes.
The ruling class couldn’t be bothered if our educational system is wrecked beyond redemption; the philosophy of its intransigence is discernible in its greed and brazen disregard for the future. The politics of greed and incompetence of the incumbent administration, like its predecessors, demands that it neglects the core issues militating against the success of the Nigerian education enterprise. Such issues include inadequate funding, poor research facilities, inadequate infrastructure, outdated lecturers and teaching methods, obsolete libraries and laboratories and the degenerate politics of discrimination between Nigeria’s polytechnic and university enterprise.
Hence the fraudulence and apparent cowardliness of the incumbent administration in addressing Nigeria’s unending educational crisis – simply because the final products end up to be you and me and every minion unfortunate to belong to the Nigerian working class.
It is therefore, the duty of every constituent of the Nigerian youth to see that in the future competition for our mandate, the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the humane, unpopular and true.
