When Malala wept for Nigeria’s future

In the very unlikely event that the ruling All Progressives Congress delivers on the current most popular demand in the land, namely, restructuring, can we say with finality that Nigeria will thereafter be on its path to greatness? Could this be the silver bullet to all problems that have plagued our country? I do not think so.

As a matter of fact, something happens every day that raises questions about chances that Nigeria will ever attain greatness far beyond its agreeably wobbly structure.

To some extent, the delusion that we are one of the greatest things to happen to the world is allowed. What a lot of us however do not realise is that such declarations only speak about the potential of the country. Unfortunately, potential is not reality and unless potential is diligently nurtured, it will remain unattained. It may even become a curse or a nightmare. Nigeria truly has the potential to be great, but a baby whose only meal remains breast milk is not likely to ever attain his potential for adulthood, not in his physique, not in his mind.

Currently, Nigeria crawls on its knees in a multitude of ways and unless it quickly snaps out of this handicap, it will remain in the dungeon of underdevelopment forever.

As I indicated at the beginning, it is impossible to exhaust the plethora of pointers to our lack of preparedness to swim out of the murky waters of underdevelopment in a single article, but I will discuss two of such worrisome events or trends presently.

The first is the quality of men and women who constitute our political class. The quality of their minds, the lack of visioning and the god complex that have arrested their minds.

As you read this piece, today’s newspapers will most certainly present accounts of governors who feel privileged to have been selected to visit President Muhammadu Buhari in London on Wednesday.

How do I know they will torment us with the victory of their inclusion on the latest entourage to visit Nigeria’s ailing leader?

I know because sycophancy rules the public space in Nigeria. I know because of the precedent set by Governor RochasOkorocha, who spoke for leaders of the APC, who visited Buhari days ago and has not recovered from the verbal diarrhoea that followed the sumptuous meal he had at the President’s table. Okorocha has rained invectives on  Nigerians in disrespect of their right to ask questions about their President.

Rather than dignify those who elected him and his friends into office and on whose bill they took this particular trip and take many other unpublicized trips, Okorocha talked down on the people he described as “merchants of lies”. In his excitement about the rare fortune of being selected to see the “Lion King”, he forgot that his pilgrimage to London was meant to convince these same people he vilified that the President was healthier.  Unfortunately, Okorocha’s vituperation could only have achieved the opposite but does he care?

This lack of concern for the effect of our leaders’ conduct and utterances on the people boldly tells of their pathetic incompetence. Over the past couple of years, Nigeria has been plagued with rapacious fellows whose lack of vision has continued to hold the country back.

Here, I anticipate the argument that Nigeria is only just taking baby steps at the practice of democracy but the truth is that the world is not waiting for any country which allows charlatans govern it. There is so much advancement in the world these days that we do not need to reinvent the wheel of governance if only we had the right people in office.

But arguments about the infancy of democracy can even be easily impeached because our politics has not always been like this. In the first, second and third republics, we had statesmen politicians who put the interest of the people ahead of their own personal interests. The tragedy of Nigeria’s current situation is that our politicians are mostly selfish.

In addition to practitioners’ penchant for ego tripping, modern Nigerian politics is also bereft of any intellectual rigour.  Politicians of old had a crop of intellectuals who formulated and analysed policies, foretelling the effects and reactions they may generate. Politicians of yore were in touch with the people. They had active women wings which ventilated on the interests of the women, youths groups which were not led by covetous 50 and 60-year-olds who desired to be youths forever like today. These days, the disconnect between government and the governed is unimaginable and widening such that those in government can no longer relate with the sufferings of the masses and imagine themselves to be masters, rather than servants of the people!

Unfortunately, Nigerians have also bought these lies. When we are not too star-struck to objectively analyse our leaders and put them to task, we are too afraid for our lives to even whimper. That in itself is a dis-incentive to development, the truth being that the citizenry and citizenship are unqualified factors in the success of any democratic experience. If Nigerians choose or make the mistake of remaining as passive as they currently are, these politicians will trample on our rights forever.

One other fear I have about the future of this country is our attitude to the education of children. Pakistani child rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, MalalaYousafzai, visited Nigeria to speak about the need to pay priority attention to the education of children, last week. It was the second time in three years that the 20-year-old would so intervene.

This time round, she met with Acting President YemiOsinbajo to weep on behalf of a country fiddling with its own future. She demanded that Nigeria dealt with its burden of 11 million out-of-school children and declared a state of emergency in education. And before they claim to have no understanding of what she was talking about, Malala reeled out a three-point agenda which include increase spending on education by 300 per cent and make all the spending public implement the Child Rights Act in all states!

Now, governors who should sit back in their states and find creative ways of improving the quality of primary and secondary education  would rather fly all over the world, come back to talk down on Nigerians and make enemies of the people that elected them.

They watch as millions of children who do not attend primary schools are deprived of a second chance without any widespread adolescent/adult literacy cum vocational plan. So, they grow into miscreants who live on cheap drugs and soon become threats to the survival of society.

Not just that. Nigeria is neither able to get almost 1.2 million aspiring young ones into higher education postings nor provide employment for hundreds of thousands of those who graduate from institutions yearly. We therefore have an army of agile, restless but idle and angry youths on our hands.

Now one of the elements of Nigeria’s projected future is its demography.  Research by the International Monetary Fund suggests that by 2025, sub-Saharan Africa will be home to 25 per cent of the global population of people aged 24 and younger. It submits that successfully providing jobs for this population would make the region the most prosperous at about this time.

But the event of not managing the demographic advantage well with the provision of the requisite investments in skills development, infrastructure and services, could render a growing proportion of youths unemployed and with little hope for socio-economic advancement. This will surely increase social tensions, undermine cohesion and stability in the society. It is exactly the negative side of this situation that Nigeria is preparing for with its lack of attention on children.

It is okay for the elite to assume that being able to send their children to private schools saves them from the dangers that the millions of untutored children portend for our future but that would be really short-sighted. How do we think insurgent groups like the Boko Haram get willing recruits? What do we think are the root causes of the increasing volumes of violence that this country currently witnesses?  If we allow things go on this way, the future, if it exists at all, is bleak.

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