By Ajiri Daniels, Abuja
Former Bayelsa State Governor and serving Senator, Henry Seriake Dickson, has stated that Nigeria’s persistent insecurity, marked by militancy, banditry, and youth criminality, is rooted in decades of insufficient investment in education.
The Beyelsa West Senator made this submission at the Inaugural Public Lecture hosted by the Forum of Nigeria Polytechnics Alumni Associations (FONPAA) in Abuja.
Speaking passionately on the theme entitled “Tertiary Education in Nigeria: A comparative analysis of funding, policies and reforms in a non-democratic and a democratic eras,” Dickson called for urgent, sustained action by all levels of government to address what he described as the most critical challenge to national peace and development.
“If you want to assess how great a nation or a government is, don’t look at the roads and bridges they build; look at what they do in education,” the Senator declared, criticizing the emphasis on physical infrastructure as a superficial measure of leadership performance.
He emphasized that while roads and bridges are important, they are the easiest projects to approve and construct, unlike educational systems that require vision, patience, and deep commitment.
Dickson warned that Nigeria’s ongoing insecurity is not driven fundamentally by religion or ethnicity, but by widespread educational deprivation. “When you trace it correctly, the root cause of our insecurity is the lack of adequate investment in education,” he said, adding that a peaceful society can only emerge from one where citizens are educated, empowered, and capable of critical engagement with their environment.
Drawing from his time as governor of Bayelsa from 2012, Dickson recalled declaring a state of emergency in education on his first day in office. He established the Bayelsa Educational Development Trust Fund, one of the first of its kind in Nigeria, financed through public service levies and 5% of the state’s Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). The fund was designed by law to ensure sustainability beyond his administration.
“I knew that for children in remote, water-bound villages to have a future, education had to be made free, fair, and compulsory. And it had to be adequately funded,” he said, referencing his strategy to combat insecurity by “democratizing education” and expanding school access to even the most isolated communities.
Dickson said the policy was not only about building schools but about empowering future generations to participate in a knowledge-driven global economy. “The only investment that doesn’t depreciate is investment in education,” he remarked. “If we don’t equip our people with knowledge and skills, we are excluding them from the future.”
On security, the former governor detailed how his administration took decisive law enforcement action to end cultism, militancy, and kidnapping, but stressed that arrests alone were not enough. “You fight crime not just by cracking down on it, but by removing the causes. And the number one route to that is education,” he said.
Senator Dickson concluded with a challenge to all elected officials to fulfill the constitutional directive of promoting education as a democratic right. “If you’re not there to expand the frontiers of education and enable your people to realize their potential, then what are you there for?”
His Royal Highness, Hon. Justice Sidi Bage Muhammad I, CFR, the Emir of Lafia, also addressed participants at the public lecture, reflecting on the decline in the quality of public institutions.
He noted that those who had their education in earlier times, many of whom led the health and security sectors, received the best education available. “I was a beneficiary of public school because it was directly under the Emir—my grandfather—and we benefited greatly from the quality of those schools,” he said.
The Emir also expressed concern that reforms introduced under democratization stripped traditional institutions of their powers, placing them in the hands of others who have, in his view, mismanaged them.