‘Knowledge’, they say, ‘is power’. If there is any gain from colonialism, it is access to knowledge. They gave us knowledge in order to rule us, and this later became their nemesis for it later turned out to enable us to rule ourselves. Interestingly, knowledge is like liquid, it assumes the shape of its container. If the container is crooked, it assumes a crooked shape, if it is straight or smooth, it assumes the same.
Education will make a good man better and a bad man worse. According to C.S Lewis, ‘education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.’ Unfortunately, we are producing more clever devils through our educational systems because of a non-incorporation of sound values.
There is nothing wrong with education but all is wrong with the recipients; otherwise, why can’t we see a corresponding level of impact or change in our society? Rather, education has made people smarter and greater thieves. Education has taught people how to meander away from the truth, accept and celebrate lies and falsehood. Education has taught us how to falsify or mutilate figures to our own advantage and to the detriment of the society.
Of what use is your education when you can not use it to emancipate your own people? Nigeria has been tied up by a group of gangsters, kleptocrats and oligarchs who throw peanuts at the teeming masses of our people and then keep the largesse in ever-swelling local and foreign bank accounts. Pre-independence scholars were responsible for the independence that we are now enjoying today.
However, over a period of time, a group of kleptocrats and oligarchs have usurped our nationhood, making it impossible for us to have a clear-cut identity as a nation. Whatever they place on the table, we take and adopt hook line, and sinker without rationalizing it at all. Of what use is education when we refuse to think and allow others to do the thinking for us even though those banal thoughts, ideas, and ideologies are channeled towards self-gratification?
They call black white and white black, and we accept it without any intellectual resistance because we are too weak and lazy mentally. The few with intellectual sagacity to question obvious irregularities and the display of inanity in matters of governance are blackmailed and blacklisted. Is it because we have no brains or our brains have become so atrophied due to gross under-utilization. We have become an indomie generation of unprocessed people who always look for a quick-fix solution to our towering problems instead of embarking on deliberate painstakingly thought-provoking processes that will bring lasting solutions to our national travails.
This kind of lazy man’s attitude has paved the way for the emergence of sharks and hawks (evil geniuses), who should have used their ingenuity for the common good but now use it to serve their selfish purposes. They might have reasoned, why rack my brain to better the society while some lazy bones, who recline daily in cosy chairs will reap from the benefit of my mental toilings and lay claim to a common credit existing as infrastructures? But then, they forget that they are public servants enlisted into public service for the good of the public.
Public institutions, and infrastructures which are put in place as products of their ingenuity are claimed by the generality of Nigerians, and rightly so. In democracy, anyone who aspires for any political post is simply indicating his or her willingness to serve the people and not him or herself.
As educated people, we should study the antecedents of those who aspire for public offices. What have they done in the past with the opportunity given to them? What is their body language towards the welfare of the nation and her people? These, and other questions should inform our decisions as educated people. It’s high time we stopped thinking like bus conductors, motor park touts, and uneducated market women because this is the way many ‘so-called educated’ Nigerians think.
There is no future for a country whose educated people think like unschooled illiterates. It’s high time we made our education count by entering the field of play with these unpatriotic sycophants with a sense of patriotism buoyed by intellectualism and godly fear in order to recover our national sanctity and sanity.
