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By Chris Nonyelum
This year’s International Day of Education was celebrated across the world, as usual, on January 24th, with diverse themes. For Africa and the rest of the developing world, the focus was on ‘’Learning for Lasting Peace in Communities of the Developing Nations.” This piece will dwell primarily on the inherent dysfunctional system of education foisted on most developing nations of the world by their colonial masters. There has always been a conspiracy theory that the West never intended to introduce a functional system of education in Africa, one that would primarily empower the people to become productive and proactive in driving the forces of development for a more progressive society. This school of thought insist, that Africa is today stuck in the stupor of arrested development, owes essentially to the well orchestrated, deliberately designed dysfunctional system of learning foisted on his people by their colonial masters.
There are also scholars who insist that we have cried enough and should have been able by now, to fashion out a sustainable educational template good enough to get us away from the clutches of colonialism, not withstanding its debilitating entanglements, ‘hangovers’ and lingering negative impact on our sensibilities. Adeyinka (2002) argues that our leaders had always followed, willy-nilly the patterns of colonial education, “too literary, not practical, not adapted to the needs of a developing agricultural nation”. Ajayi and Obidi (2005) were even more critical about a system that “tends to produce proud, lazy people who dislike manual labour and prefer white collar jobs” I still wonder why, in Nigeria, too much premium is placed on having credit in English Language as the ultimate prerequisite for gaining admission into our Universities. Why should having a credit in English Language be compulsory for a student enlisting to study Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Pharmacy or other Sciences and Technical courses?
This is a relic of colonial mentality, a sad commentary on the pendulum and patterns of our thought process that relishes and reverences everything western, but scornful of our products and initiatives. It is self-evident that we succumbed willy-nilly to the racial superiority posturing of the colonialists, a state of being validated by the ability of the White man to defeat, subdue and enslave our people. It takes the stronger man to force or coerce others to do his biddings against their will. Once this apparent superiority status was established, the colonialists’ predatory instinct took over. Of course, the primary motive for colonizing Africa was economic exploitation and nothing more. And to sustain the exploitation, it was necessary to create weak institutions and keep them perennially dysfunctional, compromise the traditional authority and rubbish our cultural heritages by engaging in subterranean, subversive activities designed to promote a class dichotomy between the elites and the common people, stir clannish patriotism, ethnic chauvinism and religious fundamentalism.
These are agent provocateurs of trouble and disunity and forces of disharmony and disintegration among the indigenous peoples that make up the ethnic nationalities in several African countries. The ultimate goal was to ensure that the deepening gulf in inequalities of the dichotomized society was sustained by the ruling elites, indifferent to the yearnings and aspirations of their people. Thus, it was also necessary to exploit the differences in religious belief systems to water and sustain mutual mistrust and needless struggles for superiority and domination. These were devious schemes implanted in the sensibilities and psyche of most African leaders, who today, are pursuing the same divide and rule system to sustain them in power. It is often said that, if you want to destroy a nation, all you need do is to kill her education. This is exactly the scenario in most African countries, especially in Nigeria. Nigeria’s educational system has collapsed and the multiplier effects are reverberating in all facets of our society with far-reaching consequences. Those expected to hand over the baton of knowledge to the next generation, are themselves devastated by poverty occasioned by incessant long strike actions, hyper inflation and total lack of focus by unscrupulous politicians steering the ship of the Nigerian state. There is hardly any motivation to teach or even to learn.
I wonder what manner of learning takes place where both the teacher and his pupils are hungry, forlorn and frustrated! The gloom that pervades the Nigerian society is producing a bunch of generation of youths who have lost faith in the system with lingering feelings of alienation, hopelessness, frustration and despair. The future has been mortgaged beyond measure, in mentally unthinkable manner, irredeemably lost without the slightest glimmer of hope. The downward trend in virtually all strata of the Nigerian society is alarming and portends grave danger for the nation. The abysmal loss of moral values has eroded our sense of propriety and created a society in which evils are glorified and celebrated, engendering animalistic instincts in our youths who engage in ritual murder and other heinous crimes in the bid to make money. And when they succeed and flaunt their ill-gotten wealth, they become celebrities and role models. The consequences are better imagined than described. Now, how can learning for lasting peace be achieved in a society where kidnapping, insecurity of lives and properties has become the order of the day?
Obviously, our educational growth, so to speak, has been held hostage by the lingering vestiges of our colonial heritage, a cancerous heritage rooted in callous exploitation, manipulation and unbridled hypocrisy in economic, political and social issues of development in our relations with the West. Unfortunately, African leaders have persistently and continually watered the grounds for the sustenance of such state of being in our bilateral relations, helping, as it were, to plunder, pillage and siphon the resources of the continent in connivance with their western counterparts. Learning in Africa, or in any of the developing nations, requires a revolutionary, radical departure from the stultifying heritages of colonialism. The reverberating backlashes of this heritage have held Africa back from articulating a robust, functional and result-oriented education system capable of equipping the African students with the necessary ‘values, attitudes, skills and behaviors’ to ‘serve as catalysts for peace in their communities’.
• Nonyelum, a public affairs analyst, writes from Umunya, Oyi Local Government, Anambra State via [email protected]
