When
I learnt that free nationwide Internet signal dissemination is possible
in Nigeria courtesy of the ubiquitous GSM masts that now litter and
fill our environments with harmful air for which minimal benefits the
masses are forced to part with their blood, my heart bled profusely.
Knowledge,
as described in the adages of races, nations and languages, is a good
possession. But, I doubt that this new knowledge is good at all. This
realistic possibility that I learnt from a discussion with a visiting
brother-in-law who, some few years ago, had fled abroad with his
exceptional brilliance to ensure that his life airtime did not get
wasted by the systemic failure that had retained the phrase, ‘Up NEPA’
as our second national anthem, long after the demise of the late NEPA
(National Electric Power Authority) is, to me, a peculiar impossibility
in my fatherland.
Yes, indeed. This good news is
a bad reminder of our ill-fate as a nation. A nation plagued by
accursed leadership. A leadership that turns every good thing of life
into an expensive privilege that only those who “belong” can enjoy. A
leadership made of people whose calling is the urge to acquire more and
more, forever and ever.
Our leaders are not just the politicians
for whom politics is a lucrative full-time career and business rather
than a communal service and sacrifice. They are not just our Obas, the
Emirs and the Igwes whose vantage birth and status are no longer a
blessing to their subjects but to the self and the self alone. Theirs is
now a cult that is inclusive of not just the richer-than-country
capitalists but also the class of super-rich ‘saints’ amidst us whose
jet-flying calling is a function of unrelenting mass demand for miracles
in our desperate country.
In whatever guises or nomenclatures
they parade themselves, self-oriented leaders have, for long, been the
Achilles’ heel of Nigeria and Nigerians. Scan every sector or sphere of
our existence, businessmen and women, dressed in varied deceitful
epithets, are in charge.
They are the traders that have been
trading away the right of the citizens to education. Their strategy, in
this regard, is an indirect one that has its roots in the deliberate
destruction of the public school system through the instrumentality of
governmental policies weaved and executed by born proprietors in
government. The people’s loss is the leaders’ gain in a country where
proceeds of exorbitant school fees ultimately find their way into the
bank accounts of former or serving public officials, outright
capitalists and clerics. No school of note in contemporary Nigeria is
owned outside this triangular clique.
The unbecoming turnaround
of the motive of religion in education is one tragedy of progress
reversal that we have ignored at our own peril. To travel in nostalgia
into the beautiful days of yore when the primary motive of religious
organisations that produced those world class missionary schools was not
profit-making but the sincere and altruistic zeal to spread knowledge
is to shed endless tears of regrets.
As a young boy from a Muslim
family, my days in Shepherdhill High School, Baptist Academy,
Obanikoro, Lagos, a Christian missionary school, still remain the
timeless residents of my brain. Or, how can I ever forget those good old
days when what mattered was not what my parents could afford to pay as
school fees. When it mattered not what religious faith they cultivated.
Or, what social class we belonged to.
No wonder. The line between
Christianity and Islam thinned into invisibility for us, as pupils,
particularly within the four walls of our school. And, with ease, I used
to decide which after-school meeting to attend every Wednesday, just
like most of my colleagues – the Muslim Student Society or Christian
fellowships.
Tragically, the fate of millions of helpless
Nigerian children, teenagers and youths hawking, begging or scavenging
on the highways, which, indeed, is the making of our heavily
commercialised educational system, suggests nothing to them. Such are
variously disdained as unserious elements, dropouts, touts, miscreants
or, at best, hustlers.
It is indeed time to reason. To open our
inner eyes by closing our outer eyes that sees only the seeming and not
the intrinsic. The inner eye that judges not by status as contradicted
by our predilections to exclude the supposedly ‘anointed’ fraction of
our populace and institutions from the simplest of logical scrutinies, a
flagrant omission from the religions we inherited from other races
never known for sacrificing logical reasoning on the altar of religious
belonging.
With the inner eyes only can we see the zeal of those
Nigerians of means who are ready to pay exorbitant and door-closing fees
even in so-called missionary schools for what it really is. It is
indeed an open perpetuation of societal poverty through conscious
sustenance and widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, the
haves and the haves-not. Pity! It is never their zeal to illuminate our
collective future with the light of knowledge but to position their own
bloods to take over the mantle of leadership and baton of oppression
over their peers, deliberately handicapped as half-baked literates or
outright ignoramuses.
Still, only with the inner eyes can we see
the real victim of the horror committed by a 21-year-old who is
supposedly the picture of the family, the schools and the society that
combine to play the potter’s role in his budding life. The real victim
of the murder involving a young university student who murdered his
father at the Redemption Camp recently is not the slaughtered Senior
Advocate of Nigeria or his immediate family which reportedly still
sustained habitual privileges for their beloved murder suspect son while
in police custody. The real victim is the Nigerian society. The Bible
passes a clear, unambiguous but damning verdict on us, in this regard:
“By their fruit, you shall know them” (Mathew 7:16). If the
father-killing Tolani Ajayi is, indeed, a fruit that sprang from one of
our best citadels of virtue and knowledge cultivation, then we are
doomed as a nation.
Where lies our future hope when, today, we
spend, per term or semester, enormous fortunes capable of redirecting
the life fortune of a pauper, to actually nurture our potential future
killers?
God forbid! A prayer indeed, which automatically
magnetizes resounding echo of “Amen” from my teeming miracle-loving but
dignity-hating compatriots.
On the whole, the tripartite
connivance amongst political/traditional, business and religious leaders
has, for long, been our albatross. Our united mistake of focussing
exclusively on political tormentors has aggravated our collective woes,
as manifest in the simultaneous death and flight of sincere and
non-conniving businesses and industries from the Nigerian space and the
nationwide skyrocketing growth of religious organisations, particularly
churches.
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