“My sister would have been alive if not for the ASUU strike,” Ummita Buhari’s brother lamented.
She was a final year Agricultural Science student of Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto, but she been home for seven months now falling in and out of love, until she was finally knifed to death by a crazed Chinese lover in Kano.
Meanwhile across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea a first lady of a nation in distress is celebrating with her family and friends after her daughter-in-law Zahra Bayero-Buhari graduated from a United Kingdom University with first class honours in Architectural Science. Aisha Buhari was so dull-witted to splash the photos on her Twitter handle for Nigerians to see the hypocrisy of a government that has brought Nigerian education to the lowest level anyone could think of.
Nigerians were naturally pissed by the insensitivity displayed by the wife of the President on a day the National Court of Industry in Nigeria arm-twisted the Academic Staff Union of Universities to return to work from which they had been absent for seven months. Former sports minister Solomon Dalung summed up the feelings of Nigerians with a follow up tweet: “The acceptable interpretation to say the least is an insult to the psyche of Nigerians. You used to stand with common people in the first tenure but this time around you have not only abandoned them but graduated into the academy of tyranny.
“What makes her better than any other Nigerian child? Given the opportunity in foreign universities some would have graduated with Distinction. This is not only insensitive but disappointing my dear Wife of the President.”
The first lady is merely going by the play book of President Muhammadu Buhuri’s attitude towards solving the problems facing the country. Crass nonchalant negligence of duty, lack of vicarious emotion and compassionately empty. For all the government cares, the lecturers can strike till eternity as long as the political ruling class and their co-conspirators in government and in corporate entities have their children in overseas universities, all the stones that need to be turned can lay forever face down.
Those in government and in power can afford to send their wards to study abroad and also flaunt it in the faces of their citizens who are hard pressed for cash and for the basic necessities of life. They can also oppress despondent Nigerians in diaspora with their extravagant display of wealth stolen from the people’s treasury and from the oil fields. Those who eat a bony fish can expect a bone to hang in their throat soon enough.
Generally, everything is broken in the Nigerian educational system from the primary to the tertiary level. It is all hogwash; and that is why every Nigerian elite is wishing their children well, by struggling to get them into schools that can offer quality education. Those who can’t afford Oxford are trying out University of Ghana. East Legon has become a refuge of sorts for middle class Nigerians who can’t bear to see their kids spending seven years schooling for a course of four years.
All nations on earth except Nigeria, take education so seriously. Governments in advanced and developing countries do not toy with human capacity development, because that is where the next generation is being trained to handle the future challenges the country might face. That is where research and ideas collide to give birth to new technologies and economies.
Does anyone wonder why Nigeria is now the butt of jokes for all countries around the world? Even people in Benin Republic do not have any regards for Nigerians the way they used to. It is a shame that a country with so many intellectuals doing great things home and abroad could be so burdened by a leadership so bereft of ideas and vision to see beyond their noses.
Because of the poor state education development many intellectuals have left and many more are set to leave to climes where their brains could be best put to use, and damn those who are not fortunate to leave, they have to cope with the arrested development and the ensuing chaos.
Illiteracy is a disease and the Nigerian leadership is so proud that 62.02 percent of its population cannot read or write. And as the population keeps increasing, more illiterates are being bred and unleashed into society. Twenty million Nigerian kids are out of school according to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) findings and there is the ministry of education and a minister who is just perambulating according to Fela Kuti.
The reason ASUU went on strike is just a tip of the iceberg. There is an educational crisis much more bigger than ASUU and it would take a government with a visionary leadership to reset the crucial sector and from the look of things that President is not yet born. Goodluck to Nigeria in 2023!
