APATA 148 YORUBA NATION: WHAT WE ARE DOING WRONG PART 2 Two Weeks ago, I asked the question “What are we Yoruba nation in Nigeria doing wrong?” Last week, I offered Part One of my answer. Here today is my Part Two. We have neglected to focus on building appropriately on the strong educational foundation which we established in the 1950s. In all of human affairs in modern times, education is recognized as the foundation for building success upon. Our leaders of the 1950s, led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, were right in making education our top priority as a people and as a Region. They were right in deciding to invest a lot of our small regional resources on starting a programme of free education for all our children – the first Free Primary Education Programme in Africa. They were right to have expended their leadership energies to encourage us, as communities, as religious bodies (Christian and Muslim), and as individuals, to build various kinds of secondary schools to provide avenues for educational advancement for the masses of our children who would pass out of our free primary schools. They were right to have encouraged the founding of various teacher-training institutions to train teachers for our schools. And they were right to have expended great energy, great resources, and great care, to establish for us a university characterized by the most ambitious excellence in all things. Altogether, they established for us the solid foundation upon which we could become a great technological, industrial and economic heavy weight – even as part of Nigeria. Chief Awolowo knew that this was the road pursued by a country like Japan to advance from being a typically poor peasant Third-world country to a technologically and economically powerful First-world country in only a few decades. He could see that we Yoruba were generally inclined to travel that path – because we had been investing heavily in Western education, more than any other African people, since the mid-19th century. He and the Western Region’s leaders of his generation therefore decided to lead us along the path – and then get Nigeria to accept the same venture and travel along the same path and thereby become the Back-man’s technological and economic world power of modern times. Unfortunately, the people in control of Nigeria’s federal government at independence decided in 1962 to destroy Chief Awolowo and the Awolowo kind of national ambition for Nigeria. Nigeria has been going downhill ever since. After Chief Awolowo came out of prison, and after the civil war ended, Chief Awolowo, always a man of great resolve and courage, decided in the late 1970s to revive the dream of a great Nigeria. He gathered young Nigerian professionals and intellectuals like me around him, and we created an enormously sophisticated political grouping and party, travelled around the world gathering ideas for development, and wrote wonderful plans and programmes for the making of a great, rich and powerful Nigeria. But the forces of decadence and corruption beat him (and us) again – not at the polls, but in the dark-room manipulations of the transition from military to civilian rule. As one of his “sons” who were closest to him in his last days, I testify that Chief Awolowo never gave up his dream. Indeed, he never ceased reiterating the dream. The basic outline for it is as follows. By the 1970s, Nigeria was earning enormous revenues from petroleum – a magnitude of income that Nigeria had not had in the 1950s. The plan was to turn all of Nigeria’s huge petroleum incomes into a tool for empowering Nigerians to build a great and powerful country for themselves. As a first step, strengthen education in all parts of Nigeria. Because education had been developing slowly in the Northern states, declare education in the North a National Priority, vote large special resources for it, and carefully and respectfully, encourage Northern leaders to promote education in their states. Secondly, strongly divert the educated youths into building a great modern economy for their country, and, to enable them to do it, support them massively with their country’s money. This would include programmes for the training of educated youths in modern work-related skills (in technical and vocational institutions in which tuition would be mostly free). It would also include programmes for modern business development – such as institutions that teach entrepreneurship, bodies that teach, encourage and mentor skilled youths to start businesses of their own, different kinds of microcredit organizations and banks devoted to helping Nigerian businesses, special encouragement of export-oriented businesses, and special programmes to entice foreigners to come and invest in Nigeria and create businesses in Nigeria and thereby provide skilled jobs for Nigerians. Modern farming would be part of all this, as well as food packaging and food processing businesses, and food export businesses. To encourage our educated people to go into farming, special allocations would be devoted to developing infrastructures (rural roads, electricity, water supply, postal services, rural banking) for rural areas throughout our country. What we Yoruba people have been doing wrong is that, though we never gave up this idea of development, we have never used it since Chief Awolowo departed from the scene. We have had the educational foundation for it all the time. And it is extremely difficult to find any significant, educated, Yoruba leader who can truly claim ignorance of it. We all know it, and we know it works. We know it has magically transformed some poor third-world countries in our time. Listen to any Yoruba politician when he is campaigning for votes, and you will hear him enunciating and promising various aspects of it. That is what our politicians mean when they say that they are Awolowo’s political sons. And when the masses of our common people say that this or that politician is a “progressive”, a progressive worthy of support, what they mean is that they believe he will do what Chief Awolowo would do. The idea lives. And, of course, it works. Apart from Japan, it has turned many poor countries into major economies in the world. In less than ten years, it turned Singapore from a poor small island without resources into one of the most successful economies in the world - now called “Asia’s success model”. It did the same to Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel in the Middle East. After messing around with ideas of socialist or communist development for decades, the world’s largest country, China, turned to this idea in the 1990s, and it has now become a great economic power. But this idea is not acceptable in Nigeria. And the reason is that it sucks all of a country’s money into programmes for empowering the masses of the people. It leaves little or no money for the rulers and influential citizens to steal and share. It kills corruption – or, at least, it makes corruption difficult to sustain. But it makes a country and its masses of people rich and comfortable and proud. As for us Yoruba, the idea is part of our modern heritage. Unhappily, our leaders of today refuse to take advantage of it, and prefer to go the Nigerian way. And by so doing, they have let us descend into shameful poverty. But the idea can never die. Someday, through some men and women who truly love their people and nation, it will return and enrich our lives. __._,_.___
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 05:44:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015