Our clothes are too big for us now. Fat has thinned on our bones and skin hangs loosely on our sketchy frames.
Forget the few who got fat, (awon awodi jeun epe sanra – the birds that nourish from the pot of the accursed) we have become weightless for lack of wisdom;
PhD, MSc, HND, BSc… name it, we have it. Yet Nigeria flounders for lack of wisdom.
Our afflictions were of predatory leadership and ravenous citizenship. Today, we mutate into murderous Boko Haram and hate-mongering IPOB. Recently, a desperate clown announced Biafra’s secession.
If we look beyond the comedies of these antlers of currency-activated tragedy, we would find that we are indeed a curious lot. We stifle the brainy, bury the clever and make the hare-brained determiners of our life course.
Thus in our country, there is no distinction between the cockeyed and the shrewd, anymore. Up is down and down is up.
“Nigeria is a failed state…We are hostages to a greedy few,” becomes our mournful cry. How long shall we feed grief on impotent saw?
In the distance, brilliant spokes of our ‘brighter future’ evade us. Around the corner, Nigeria’s ‘future’ or ‘promising youth’ if you like, flash senior citizens scary sneers at dagger-point; sometimes, at gun-point, to obtain the poor victims’ wallets.
Pan to the first illicit meeting inside the grifter’s bedroom, dormitory or crummy café. The pace slows. Hustler meets hustled. The pace quickens, the ‘future’ scarcely breathes, until the beep that distils anxiety fetes with cold, sly gluttony. Maga don pay, shout Alleluia!
Our ‘promising youth’ have learnt to be fraudsters. Let Magu mount the heat on ‘Yahoo boys,’ the con will always yield. It’s a fool’s paradise that we inhabit.
Our maidens are still out in the cold, pulling a different kind of trick by the street-corner, every hour. Some days, they do the hustle on sidewalks, in the privileged neighbour’s bedroom, on the boss’ sofa and under the flicker of neon lights. Whatever the venue, pleasure seethes and sizzles beneath the shimmer of colourful, ‘sexy’ underwear.
Our children have become brainy in the devil’s workshop. Their minds are busy where pernicious wile mutates to scourge. They are no more the ‘addle-brained’ in over-burdened lecture halls.
Our schools are open but the theatres of true scholarship remain shut. Parents grieve, the studious weep and ASUU stews in the lull of true scholarship but our predatory governors and senators are having a blast.
They do not care that Nigerian schools have become tombs of scholarship and unfettered endeavour.
Who cares if our schools remain shut? Let ASUU embark on the lengthiest of strike actions, it is our children that would know grief.
True scholarship, the knowledge that lifts, are meant for the children of the ruling class and their partners in crime, or ‘state-made billionaires’ if you like. That is why they plunder coffers to educate their children abroad.
Statesmanship wrought in foundries of deceit; t is the way of our leaders to have our schools shut while their wards enjoy sterling scholarship overseas.
While they rob us silly, we break into hymns of random intellectualization, seeking to impress our peer and fellow impoverished, with frantic wit and tedious platitudes.
I could do-the-done-thing and romanticize the tragedy of our educational system. As usual, I could recycle solutions and couch them in feathery words. I could demand that government honour its pact with ASUU but would it change a thing?
We have been thoughtless for too long but we would never know that because we do not stare hard at the picture enough.
Our schools are not on the front row with the eminent and we do not even lead the back row of the delinquent.
Every hour, we caress what we used to be and deny what we have become. It does not matter that our schools are never good enough, our hopes entwine delusions of grandeur. Hence our preoccupation with ‘universities global ranking.’
In the ferocity of our silliness, we moot tiresome slogans, glorifying the apprentice shops we call ‘universities.’ For all our bluster, our schools are yet to birth a Nigerian theory. After too many years, it’s only fair that they evolved a Nigerian theory. Perhaps our home-grown socio-political theory of corruption.
Brings to mind the story of the itinerant scholars, who came from the Middle East. Studious and parched, they arrived to cup spirited sips from our prairie spring, at that hyperbolic flagship, we call ‘Premier’ of the pack.
Nobody told them of the conveniences that stink of shit. Nobody told them of the open galleries that doubled as baths, and sometimes, glorified latrines.
They thought it was a joke that the laboratories are bare, at the flagship they painstakingly separated from the pack.
One desperate call and they were back in their homeland, away from the stink of filth of Nigeria’s premier university – hope diminished, lessons learnt. No more shall their inborn thirst covet the spring of our exchange programmes.
Still we remain what we have become. Seeking hope and finding none, we struggle to bear-hug our spent glories.
These days, we labour to answer our famished names. Would cadavers stir to the forced, cold airs of praise? Would the tragedies of today smother in the reality of yesterday?
Ill-informed and at tethers end, we extol over-burdened curricular like spider webs on a moth in distress. As if that would answer our flimsiest problems. Forgive me folks, if like the ‘standard’ intellectual, I recycle frantic answers to tiresome ills.
Everything rubs on the other, to rob the other. Wisdom has deserted us. Of what use are academic honours that make our lives no better? It’s time we strip the clueless of power.
Apology to the ‘change’ movement but our education sector reflects the ineptness of the government in power. Apology retracted, it shames me to think the incumbent government is bereft of ideas.
While our kids stew in the stagnant filth of substandard education, APC governors jet out to celebrate their wards’ graduation from Ivy League schools’ abroad. And you and I are paying for it. Our children suffer for our frantic lust to play dumb.
It’s about time we rid Nigeria of the empty heads holding sway. ’Improved public schools in Rwanda see private academies close down.’ If only the headline would read: “Improved public schools in Nigeria force private schools to shut down.”
In Rwanda, “Many private schools reported a two-thirds decline in student admissions at the close of 2016… Students in private schools decreased from 101,510 in 2012 to 79,076 last year while enrolment in public and government-aided schools almost doubled in the same period.
Rwanda’s Ministry of Education simply expanded capacity and teaching infrastructure in public schools, it also introduced the school feeding programme and abolished school fees.
Let us wrest our destinies from the grip of the ethically-bankrupt and intellectually-challenged leadership.
Buhari and Osinbajo are never enough. Their ‘body language’ do not serve us. It’s about time we neutered their generation from power. It’s about we sought the candidates whose humaneness and ethics deserve our votes.
