These ironies are grand enough to evoke that famous personal rebuke from the straight-as-pin Parson, among wide-and-merry co-pilgrims to St Thomas Becket shrine at Canterbury, England, in Geoffery Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “If gold rusts, what would iron do?”
The Tales of Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) was a biting sarcasm of the grand hypocrisy of Middle Age Catholic England. The goodly Parson, a humble priest with modest parishioners, found himself in the midst of the flower of the English Roman Catholic, laity and clergy: the Miller whose thumb was golden with stealing his customers’ grain; the Summoner, spiritual thug and bully who made corrupt living as local papal police; the Pardoner, another unfazed spiritual racketeer who claimed he had, in his pouch, papal pardon “hot, fresh and smoking from Rome”, available at the right fee; and of course the handsome Wife of Bath, whose chaste exterior was not unlike the Biblical white sepulchre: glittering outside but rotten within.
In the midst of such mass degeneracy, the Parson, though a moral icon, always cautioned himself, against skidding into the wide and merry way: “If gold rusts, what would iron do!”
That was in 14th century England.
In 21st century Nigeria, the Parson-spirit would appear totally non-existent.
Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, PhD, was an academic totally made in Nigeria – BSc (Port Harcourt), MSc (Port Harcourt), PhD (Port Harcourt). To boot, His Excellency even reportedly had a teaching stint in a tertiary institution, before succumbing to graver matters of state: Deputy Governor, Governor, Vice President, Acting President, President to complete the ill-fated Umaru Yar’Adua’s term and now President on his own first term, ogling a second!
Yet, His Excellency cannot defend the integrity of the system that made him. He would appear not to “give a damn” about the anguish of millions of Nigerian youth, out of school for three months and still counting; simply because they have an unfeeling, insensitive and irresponsible government, which does not seem to care about their future; about the throes of former colleagues in the Academia, condemned to scrounging water from stone because the Nigerian state simply doesn’t regard education as priority; about the collapse of the university system, acutely distressed and seriously creaking!
Indeed, how the president has handled the ASUU strike, vis-a-vis the implosion in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), paints the iron-clad difference between the politician and the statesman: Jonathan the politician would rather worry about the next election by focusing on PDP troubles, than on the next generation by suffering distractions from the ASUU strike!
If gold rusts, what would iron do!
Of course, if the fish is rotten in the head, what there is left of the body? Prof. Ruquayyatu Rufa’i, sacked former Education minister – sacked not for the tardy handling of the ASUU crisis but because she is an ally of Jigawa Governor, Sule Lamido: no friend of the president ahead the 2015 electoral sweepstakes – promptly declared she would head back to her desk at Bayero University, Kano (BUK).
That prompted Citizen Obo Effanga to ask on his facebook wall: will she then join the ASUU strike? The irony was apparently totally lost on the former minister! Minister yesterday; lecturer tomorrow! Not even enlightened self-interest could make the minister defend the essence of her profession, when she had the opportunity! See, how far gone are the Nigerian state and its high officials?
If gold rusts, what would iron do!
You can dismiss Nyesom Wike, Education minister of state and current supervising minister. He is no gold in that sector, just a Rivers political battler moonlighting in the crucial Education ministry. No wonder: the rambler has since gone on the rumble in the Rivers jungle! Education, ASUU and allied distractions are all but fading echoes! That is proof of Jonathan’s regard for education!
But there is every reason to worry about Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Finance minister and coordinating minister for the economy, who snorted her finance ministry had no cash to pay ASUU, even if the Federal Government had earlier signed an agreement to that effect. So, what does her ministry have cash for?
How a brilliant woman with startling degrees from America’s Ivy League schools would volunteer such is well and truly amazing. If America had not invested in its own education, would she be so proud of her American training? And is it taboo for Nigeria to invest in its; so that its future graduates too would be a toast of the world, as America’s is today?
But that is the point! Mrs Okonjo-Iweala would rather count the beans and declare “economic growth”, while local development indices roll back by the second. It is tribute to fuzzy thinking in high quarters that it isn’t glaring that Dr. Okonjo-Iweala’s economic policy is, in real terms, tailored towards underdevelopment. It must have the approving smack of Breton-Woods – and these blokes share their glory with nobody! Remember Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 timely early warning: Neo-colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism?
If gold rusts, what would iron do!
It is amazing how hyper-educated Nigerians, at the acme of the Nigerian state, are education philistines; though they are living witnesses to other countries’ glorious investment in their own educational system; or even Nigeria’s past investment in this crucial sector.
It is even more amazing that past beneficiaries of the golden age of Nigerian education, before the locust years of the military, have almost all drifted abroad for daily bread, giving their host countries a surfeit of their silky skills, while their own country bleeds – and future generation acutely thirsts.
But the most amazing perhaps, are products of Nigerian universities who have bought into the philistinism of their misguided rulers. To them, there is absolutely no reason to fix the problem. Public universities are sheer poison; and lecturers there are nincompoops: nincompoops that drilled the now cocky former students into the present Socrateses, who now regard their former lecturers (read ASUU) as hare-brained!
Their credo: amass enough cash, send your children or wards abroad, or to local private universities; and consign ASUU to rust with its umpteenth campaign for better funding of universities! Their Socratic formula: Flee! Typically Nigerian. But sorry, your problems will not run away from you!
Besides, technology is not machines; but a way of life. So, if you are not in full control of your education, how do you forge a winning technology – your own niche to compete in the very unequal market the West fraudulently brandishes as “globalisation”?
Those who abandon public universities to rust, because their children are not there, are as guilty as Jonathan’s gang of philistines. The mass thorns from public varsities will choke their own fanciful flowers from avant-garde schools here or abroad – except of course, the hope of a future Nigeria is the Diaspora!
Nigeria has no choice but to fully fund university education. The time to start is now.
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