Lekan Sote
For the low, laughable, calibre of many of those who voted, were voted for, or will be voted for in future Nigerian elections, Dr. Kayode Esuola of the Institute of Diaspora Studies of the University of Lagos offered two explanations.
First, he argues, the more articulate and educated middle class do not vote, or habitually turn out in very low numbers to vote. They also do not generally offer themselves for political offices because they have the impression that politics is a dirty and dangerous game.
Somebody, however, argues that that is a narrative sold by political deal makers who want to warehouse and allocate political offices to quislings who will always do their bidding, turn over the purse strings of the commonwealth to political godfathers.
Finally, Esuola says, those who vote are usually kids, most of whom are picked from off the streets, and therefore lack the ability to query the manifesto or even the character and competence of the rascals that offer to run for political office.
He adds, for effect, that at political rallies, premium is placed on the performances of musicians, instead of the prowess of political candidates to articulate their manifestos. This means that the electorate vote for candidates, not on the quality of their manifestos, but on the level of thrill they get from the musicians.
In fact, the youth at political rallies hardly listen to whatever the political candidates say, partly because they are impatiently expecting to listen to the musicians, and partly because the public address systems at those rallies do not always give audible sound.
What this means is that the selection process of Nigeria’s political leadership is skewed to favour the wrongest, those with little or no qualms about doing the unethical, unjust, unconscionable, and the inept.
Adam Adedimeji, a former law editor of Daily Independent newspaper, provided an interesting perspective. He observed that those who seek appointive positions in government have to provide the National Youth Service Corps Discharge Certificate, because they are expected to have a university education.
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He then pointed out the irony which requires those who seek elective positions, like President, governor, legislator, and local government chairman, which have higher responsibilities and prestige, to only provide evidence of high school education or its equivalent.
In case you haven’t guessed it, Adedimeji is suggesting that Section 131(d) of Nigeria’s constitution has provided the surest guarantee that only the least qualified Nigerians will occupy the most important political and strategic positions in Nigeria.
Find below, what Section 131(d) of the constitution says: “A person shall be qualified to seek the office of President (of Nigeria) if he has been educated up to at least (secondary) school certificate level or its equivalent.”
If you come at this with a reverse logic, you might probably conclude that Kemi Adeosun lost her job as Nigeria’s Minister for Finance only because she took the trouble of educating herself up to the university level.
This effort at personal development, part of a plan to upgrade her capacity to deliver better service to her nation, also compelled her to go get an NYSC Discharge Certificate that turned out to be fake. Unfortunately.
Anyone who became a minister by presenting an Ordinary Level certificate wouldn’t have had to go through the agony or disgrace that Adeosun experienced. So, the less educated you are, the better for you, it seems!
That is why (it is rumoured) that some governorship candidates, who are university graduates, but did not observe the mandatory youth service, deny that they attended university.
But you can see the logic of such a candidate if indeed he suppressed the information that he attended a university.
A friend offers the interesting opinion that Section 131(d) was sneaked into the 1999 Constitution to enable some of the old generation military officers, most of whom have Ordinary Level certificates, but want to participate in politics after the military’s return to the barracks.
The poor quality of Nigeria’s political leaders is largely responsible for the poor quality of their policies. Human resources experts insist that personnel will determine how an organisation will be run. Obviously.
Something far more devastating is that less-educated public office holders are setting the tone of moral and work ethics, and it is affecting the educated negatively.
It is not unusual these days for a professor, who feels that his education is not earning as much as he thinks he deserves, to say, in Yoruba, “Se iwe la fe je ni,” are we going to live on mere erudition?”
You may not be able to blame this professor when you consider that the Nigerian system compensates the untrained more than the educated and competent. Education does not seem to be helpful to the educated.
You can only imagine the agony of the professor genuflecting, or kissing the aspect of the human anatomy that the French call the derriere of a half-educated, clueless, governor who appointed him as a commissioner. Imagine the epitome of excellence having to address a not-so-excellent inferior as His Excellency.
The whole shebang is playing out in the educational system whereby a candidate with low Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination scores, who comes from a so-called educationally disadvantaged state, obtains admission into a federal university, while his compatriot with a higher score is denied admission. An American may say this policy sucks.
This has negatively affected the quality of education in Nigeria, whose human capital development strategy emphasises appearance over substance and merit. And the effect of this default resonates throughout the nation. Every economic sector in Nigeria is experiencing a dearth of qualified personnel.
South-West Nigeria, regarded as the Athens of Nigeria, because it hosts Nigeria’s premier university, benefited from the free universal education policy implemented by the Obafemi Awolowo-led Action Group, and has a relatively high number of educational institutions, has lost its educational lustre.
Concerning the South-West’s erstwhile “leading position in the world on every aspect of primary and secondary education and their curricula,” a certain Tayo Martins wrote, “I specifically read (from documents at the National Archives in the University of Ibadan), that Britain (was) rated third position behind Nigeria (in the past).”
He then lamented: “It is therefore a sad development that today in the field of education the (South-West) has since descended from its once Olympian heights into the gutter slab.” He blames it all on military officers that were appointed as military governors/administrators to run states other than their own states of origin.
Though far-fetched, this conspiracy theory to undermine the educational system of the South-West, or the entire country, is fed by the anti-intellectualism that prevails in an institution that puts precious little store on “dogo turenchi,” or long grammar.
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A military officer friend, now dead, once explained that whereas there are many military officers, serving or retired, who possess very high academic diplomas and professional certificates, they would rather speak rough English in order to connect with the troops.
Some Nigerians, like the Academic Staff Union of (Nigerian) Universities, that is currently sparring with President Muhammadu Buhari’s government, claim that government puts too little money into education, and this compromises the infrastructure and standard of education.
Unfortunately, that is true. The biggest challenge against good governance in Nigeria is in the deadly assault on education.
–Twitter @lekansote1
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