© Numero Unoma
Today’s title is of the words of Victor Hugo. As one could well imagine, the world is rife with clever quotations about education, originating from a diversity of cultures and eras, all of which hold timelessly true. But there’s no denying that the link between education and opportunity actually correlates with crime rates.
Tomorrow is UNESCO’s 55th International Literacy Day, followed the next day by the UN’s International Day to Protect Education from Attack. The latter was instigated only two years ago after a UN Security Council debate, which “under the leadership of Niger, issued its first ever Presidential Statement dedicated solely to protecting children’s education from attack.”
We Nigerians feel that particular pain both acutely and chronically, we know firsthand about the attack on the education of our children. First, there is the school of thought (pardon the pun) behind Boko Haram, whose very name vilifies Western education, and then there is the actual day-to-day behaviour of Boko Haram, who routinely raid our schools for hostages, child-brides and juvenile soldiers, without compunction or contrition. Or even repercussion.
We find ourselves not in a war zone, but on conflict turf, so why are we not able to protect our school children from the psychological and physical brutalities of terrorism? According to Bloomberg, “By many measures, African immigrants are as far ahead of American whites in the educational achievement as whites are ahead of African-Americans.” So where are all those well educated Nigerians we keep hearing about in the international media, and why are we not feeling the yields of their education on the ground in solving this problem? Don’t ANY of them come home at all?
Many educated Nigerians are a different kind of hostage altogether, and end up being the not-so-empty vessels who make the most noise. As Socrates so succinctly put it, education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. How Nigerians love to aspire to Oxbridge and Ivy League education, without any critical thinking about what they are taught to become at those institutions. The value systems that are taught there were never designed to empower or nurture the likes of us melanated people, rather to make us useful tools. I recently mentioned Ubuntu to a seemingly well educated Caucasian friend of mine. “I’m not sure what Ubuntu is but I prefer to keep it away”, she said. I see a similar ignorance happening to a lot of Africans in the form of brainwash.
Those who themselves, and whose children attend these institutions often have no care for the Chibok Girls of the world. One American I daresay many such Nigerians emulate, Malcolm Forbes, the “American business leader, owner-publisher of Forbes magazine, and promoter of capitalism”, who according to Wikipedia was ‘known for his opulent lifestyle and lively selfpromotion”, once said that “education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” If only!
`One of the real attacks on education is the inequity of it all, that seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of elitist bigotry. So-called international students at Oxford University, who ostensibly earn in soft currencies and pay in hard, are charged almost three times the amount of fees that domestic students pay, despite the fact that the university website states that “The colleges of Oxford University are financially autonomous”, ergo they are not supported by the taxpayer, which would normally be the argument for such a difference. Ironically this goes to their blockheads, like with buying an overpriced designer garment.
When our people place more prestige on branding themselves with sweatshirts emblazoned with ‘Oxford’ or ‘Columbia’ than applying the education they got there to the sort of critical thought that would lead to an incisive SWOT analysis of the application of said education in the context of their own economy or culture, then they might as well be wearing a fake Gucci T-shirt from Balogun Market. A friend of mine who only ever attended a 4-month fellows program, likes to wear Yale t-shirts at his Abuja gym, to which he drives an SUV with a Yale bumper sticker.
My father always proudly made the distinction between his DPhil from Jesus College Oxford, and everybody else’s PhDs from where ever else. However, I am proud to say that my father took his skills back home and availed himself to Nigeria, not only as a doctor, but more importantly as a teacher of doctors, and as my siblings and I grew older, whenever a doctor identified us as Prof’s offspring, they went out of their way to be good to us because of the respect they had for our father as a professor. Indeed his influence was so apparent, that they themselves stood out from many other doctors, in their attention to detail and professional manners.
Our father had studied medicine at Heidelberg University, one of Europes oldest, and had not been shaped by the ridiculous elitist brainwash that Oxbridge delivers before he later arrived there. Even today, many people in the UK blame the mess the country is in on the Oxbridge alumni that have pervaded all public office with their sneering elitism, often devoid of soul or street level practicability. Oscar Wilde, who attended Oxford University himself once said “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” The only thing the braggarts end up proving, is that they have a lot to prove.
Similarly, so many people of colour are thirsty merely for the accolade that supposedly comes with graduating from LSE or SOAS, which to this day remain the financial and cultural long arms of the British Empire, respectively, even after all their recent ‘reforms’. After their studies, there follows a lot of rhetoric about development and sustainability, and then these graduates mostly go on to join the ranks, working with so-called not-for-profits whose life blood is funding from the brainwashers. DfID, Hivos, Ford Foundation, the list goes on of huge annual budgets spent on we know not what, and we see not what.
The most these ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ organisations deliver is rhetoric like:
“a world in which all individuals, communities [ ] share equitably in the knowledge, wealth, and resources of society; and are free to achieve their full potential.” (Ford Foundation mission statement)
President of the FF, Darren Walker, a millionaire and one of the earliest recipients of the Head Start program aimed at low-income families, is an African American who embodies the American Dream, and who was recently cited in the Financial Times as saying “philanthropists are generally privileged people and privileged people don’t like to be made uncomfortable” as well as admitting that “unfortunately, we have a distorted form of capitalism and a distorted form of philanthropy that is contributing to more inequality”
Or
“We accompany and coach them as they work towards achieving the legal and policy changes they have targeted” (HIVOS “We Lead” active in 9 countries in Africa)
HIVOS are present in several African countries and other regions, but with a budget of 40 million for 2021-25, they are considerable ‘pedagogic’ influencers.
”With business and social skills training, young people can increase their chances on the labour market.” (Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
The Dutch Foreign Ministry’s LEAD (Local Employment for African Development apparently created 17,000 sustainable jobs offering decent work directly to young people in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Nigeria and Somalia. First of all, those young people have been trained by them and are now loyal to their system, and second that amounts to only 2,400 per country. It certainly make you wonder about budgets and agendas.
Or how about: “enhancing the leadership skills and opportunities of women workers [ ] will ultimately enable women to strengthen their competence and seek leadership positions” (FEMNET. The African Women’s Development and Communication Network)
Working with funders including but not limited to the EU, HIVOS, the Ford Foundation and UNWomen, they brag that “10,000+ African women and girls are reached, mobilized and informed on Women’s Rights annually”
Errrm…divide that by 50 member countries, that’s 200 women annually per country. Where does all the donor money go??
Apart from the not-for-profit sector, the other significant influencers in the literacy and education of populations who have been let down by their government, such as Nigerians and Africans at large, are churches and mosques, radio stations and last not least, private schools and universities, many of which are either faith-based or profit-makers. The perpetuation of Eurocentric value systems via these institutions who delude themselves as being agents of change is unmistakable. You see, illiteracy, education and miseducation are huge money spinners, as well as very useful and insidious vehicles for soft propaganda. The rest of the world believes the seductive lies the Global North tells about itself, and so blinded by financial gain or status, we have stopped asking the right questions. Mind Control is real. Ask Stephen Marley:
Mind control, it’s mind control
Corruption of your thoughts
destruction of your soul
Don’t let them mould your mind
They want to control mankind
Seems like their only intention is to exploit the earth
And you trust in their deceit
Your mind causes your defeat
And so you become an invention to distort this earth
Propaganda and lies
Is a plague in our lives
How much more victimised
Before we realise?
UNESCO’s website tell us that “In the aftermath of the pandemic, nearly 24 million learners might never return to formal education, out of which, 11 million are projected to be girls and young women. To ensure no one is left behind, we need to enrich and transform the existing learning spaces through an integrated approach and enable literacy learning in the perspective of lifelong learning.” I hate to imagine how many of those might be Nigerians and Africans.
The good news is that today and tomorrow, UNESCO will hold a two-day hybrid international event in Abidjan, the concept note of which reads “FFA Framework For Action emphasises the importance of Adult Learning and Education (ALE) in active citizenship, political participation, social cohesion, gender equality, and therefore important for overall socio-economic benefits to the individuals, communities, and society.”
But what excites me the most is their pledge to create “learner-centric literacy spaces which promote the literacy in local language and support the learners in becoming literate in their first language along with their literacy in national languages”
Nice thought. Kudos UNESCO, but I’ll believe that when I see it. Meanwhile, let’s take some education into the prisons. What say you?