Nigeria must ramp up culture education for sustained peace, says NUC’s Chris Maiyaki

Chris Maiyaki, the acting executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), says Nigeria must ramp up cultural education for sustained peace.

Maiyaki spoke at the grand finale of the 2024 Peace Art Competition in Abuja on Tuesday.

The competition was organised by the Idimuwem Peace and Governance Initiative (IPGI) in collaboration with the Black Montessori Education Fund and the Belgium Embassy.

Maiyaki said Nigeria is “in a hurry” to produce culturally educated people to guarantee peaceful coexistence.

“Peace is a function of education, and this is where the NUC and all education stakeholders gathered here are preoccupied with,” he said.

At the event, Pieter Leenknegt, the ambassador of Belgium to Nigeria, said peace is not just the absence of fighting, but a culture of peace.

“It’s about actively working for society where everybody is at peace with one another. It’s about culture, it’s about education,” he added.

Uduak-Abasi Akpabio, the convener of the Peace Art Competition, argued that peace is a capacity that can be built.

Akpabio noted that Nigeria has so much potential and one thing it needs to build capacity for is peace.

“One of the things I did was to write books because I was interested in peace education getting into the curriculum. However, I realized that beyond getting into the curriculum, we need to start early to build capacity among children and youth,” he said.

“One way of doing so is to identify mediums and ways that children and youth enjoy and can understand and engage with. Because if I take them to a place and start doing capacity building they would tune off after some time.

“For children, one of the mediums that has been identified is arts. A child may not be able to speak but he can identify, he can make drawings.”

Also speaking, Ayuba Caleb, a representative of the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ICPR), noted that there are millions of people still suffering due to armed conflicts and other humanitarian catastrophes.

Ayuba said stakeholders must restate their resolve to, as a global community, bring these challenges to an end.