Structure of government
by
I do not seem to understand the structure of government. The President speaks and some one takes notes and three months later, nothing is heard about what the President said. A hard-working author writes a book and the governor is so impressed that he asks that fifty thousand copies be ordered for the school system. Almost two years after, someone in the ministry of education is still insisting on doing nothing about the order because his terms for acquiring the books as the schedule officer have not been finalized. What does the author do? Go back to the governor? No, in this time when corrupt officers must be shown up for what they are, the author does not want a stupid man to lose his job and end his career in disgrace. So, the books are not bought and the school system is denied the quality of material that should be part of our children’s upbringing.
This attitude is strange to situations where the language of communication is speed, economy and results. In the banks, in commercial houses, in fact, anywhere in the private sector, the word of the chief executive is law, and where it is not obeyed, someone is on his way out. How do we expect things to move in Nigeria, in Africa of the 21st century where government must call the shots in every department of life? Those who plead that government should do what it knows best, and I am one of them, will continue to be a nuisance to those who believe that government must go to the marketplace and decide the price of every akara ball.
Take the order of the President as an example. He said, and he was hailed widely for it, that history must be taught in schools. I do not know what anyone has done about it, but if the system is what has publicly been showing in its hand in the management of fuel distribution, power supply, rail transportation, and telephones, then the likelihood is that in the year 2003 when everyone will be campaigning and would have no time to monitor what is happening, our schools would still be producing robots. For those who know nothing of their culture, which history is the main teacher of , are robots that are exposed to manipulation of the world outside.
I suggest that we start immediately to arrest the trend which has reached the world outside that the products of our institutions know nothing because they were given nothing. Yes, they went through the school system, but so what? Did the school system go through them? What were they told, about themselves, their past, their present, their future? What do they know about their neighbours, about this country, its history and the history of the African peoples and our brothers and sisters in the Diaspora? Why does every Jew know about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob before they tell you about every important name in their branch of the 12 tribes of Israel? Even when they were enslaved and dispersed to all corners of the earth, did they lose any trend in their unbroken line of intense tutelage? Have they ever been forced into such submission to foreign cultures that they for even one minute denied their origin?
What have we been exposed to? We have been told about our inferiority, about God’s order that we should fetch water and hew wood for mankind. How could God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, ordain for us a low place on the rungs of the ladder of human development? Yet, in the past, we were civilised enough to provide a safe haven even for those Muslims that were being hounded out of Mecca. In the past, we provided the venue for the selection of the books that today make up the Holy Bible. In the past, one of the most trusted scholars of the Holy Qu’ran came from among us. In the past, the Greeks came to our Egypt to learn the ways of man and of God. But because nature was so kind to us as to protect us from extreme heat and extreme cold, and from floods and tremors and earthquakes, we lost out to adventurous men whose brief was to take from those even the little they had. If they had stopped at taking the silver and gold, that would have been nothing. But they took our best and transported them across the Atlantic in conditions that every school child ought to be told about so that they would grow up never to be slaves again. But the deprivation continues and we have forgotten even how to think in the langues God blesses us with.
So, we must return to the study of history and i call on Mr. President to set up a Commission that will be headed by the Emeritus professor of history, Chef Ade Ajayi. His credentials have never been in doubt, but they glowed brilliantly when in February at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, he delivered this year’s lecture on Towards African Renaissance in the 21st Century under the auspices of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation. The lecture registered in the hearts of everyone because it spoke to them from within the heart of one of them.
The Commission that Prof. Ajayi should head will have two arms. The first will be the arm of Teachers of History who must all have studied history fro our perspective and can impart it from our perspective. They will be the resource persons. The other will be a Council of 109 who would be representatives from the senatorial district of the federation. Each senatorial district is a sub-ethnic group of the nationality group. They must be those who will help co-ordinate curriculum development in the senatorial district for the history of the peoples of that district to be scientifically documented. Within the next 15 years, we should be having in the school system, children who would know their clans, their sub-ethnic groups, and their national groups. At the tertiary levels, we should be teaching the history of Nigeria and the history of Africa. The histories of other peoples would be necessary in postgraduate work. Under no circumstances must any institution in Nigeria offer history of any peoples outside the race at any level below the university level. Our cultures will come alive for us within ten years, and the internet should be bursting with our own version of the world as we see it, as we know it.
The other day, I was surfing the internet and was surprised that while I could download everything I needed on different beliefs of other peoples, the material on African religions was locked up to be released only when you pay a fee! That is the new way to cultural imperialism, and we cannot let it take us far into this century. The President’s men must sit up and call Professor Ajayi to come over and start work on compulsory history teaching in our schools. The build-up must start in the family, through the school system. At the end of the day, we should go into the information super highway, with something from us - our own heritage of which we shall be proud.