President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria.Nigeria: From the Wasted Generation To the Retarded GenerationThose who have been following the genesis of the Nigerian crisis since 1960 to date can understand the predicament of our social and political woes and tell you that things are getting worse and no matter the political propaganda of the paid apologists of the ruling political contractors in the corridors of power, those who are going through the dire straits know that Nigeria was better even during the tragic years of the late military despot Gen. Sani Abacha.
The most glaring indices of the present calamities are the recurrent mass failures recorded by majority of Nigerian secondary school pupils and the intellectual morons graduating from the tertiary institutions and the collapse of the manufacturing industries in the country.
The generation of Prof. Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe has been described as the wasted generation, because even though their generation gave us the most brilliant scholars and administrators since 1960 when Nigeria gained political independence from British colonial rule, they failed to use the intelligentsia for the nation building of a New Nigeria in the leadership of Africa. Therefore, they have been called the wasted generation. But the present generation is even worse than the wasted generation, because they cannot even give us brilliant scholars and competent administrators, but retarded pupils and students and intellectually retarded graduates and corrupt administrators who have broken the Guinness World Records for mass failures in academic scholarship and preposterous corruption with the scandals of the billions they have misappropriated in the pension fund scams, fuel subsidy scams and other fraudulent cases making daily headlines. Definitely, this not our Nigerian Dream!
The comic and tragic cases resulted in my book
In the House of Dogs and The Guardian newspaper of Nigeria coincidental published extracts from the book on January 1, 2012, to welcome the New Year, the same day President Goodluck Jonathan announced the removal of the subsidy on petrol and provoked a nationwide strike and general protests that nearly crippled his government until he backpedaled and had peaceful negotiation with the Organized Labour for a more acceptable pump price of petrol. But the fundamental issues have not been resolved even though President Goodluck Jonathan is trying his best to be a smart politician from what he has been taught by his political godfathers in the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). But the harrowing nightmares of the lunatic fringe of Islamic terrorists on suicidal mission in the middle belt and northern regions are giving him sleepless nights.
The tragedy of our present crises is the fact that majority of our youths are living like dogs and prefer their escapist lifestyles in the fast lane with their western indulgences in music, fashion and sports, but ironically they are lagging behind in western education, economy and technology, because majority of them are addicted to western mobile gadgets online and offline like Facebook and smart phones, but then only an insignificant number of them can develop any of the apps. Because, they are retarded.
Now let me address the genesis of the present Nigerian crisis from the following extracts from
In the House of Dogs.
It’s not easy to state who started it or how many died. But the horror for those affected is clear.
— Craig S. Keener, June 2010.Dear Karl Maier,
This house has not yet fallen, but it is shaking.
Our house is full of strange bed fellows of lunatic fringe elements of the black sheep of a dysfunctional family.
One is turbaned and goes round the bend bowing to the crescent moon and star suffering from a very contagious Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease of his mad cows.
The other one has gone loco from sniffing too much hydrocarbons in his littoral states at the bottom of the river Niger.
Imagine living in the house of nightmares, cast between the devil and the deep blue sea and caught in the snares of the sirens.
Our house is like a home full of Wole Soyinka’s “Madmen and Specialists”, swimming in the whirlpool of the vicious circle of the same ethno-religious conflicts that precipitated us into the catastrophic internecine civil war of the late 1960s. The same ethno-religious crises are recurring now with incessant attacks by homegrown terrorists plunging Jos, Maiduguri and Abuja into chaos with carcasses of burnt-out vehicles and razed houses, mosques and churches and the charred remains of corpses littering the streets with acrid smells attacking our nostrils and leaving us ill from the nausea.
Religious fanatics of the lunatic fringe on rampage have murdered hundreds of innocent compatriots in reprisal attacks.
Brothers of that lunatic Farouk Abudul Mutallab the al Qaeda “Underwear Bomber who failed in his satanic attempt to blow up the Northwest Airlines Flight 253, en route from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan, on December 25, 2009, have unleashed their terrors on us as they sighted the moon on Christmas Eve of 2010 at about 7.15 pm in Jos and Maiduguri, and struck again on the New Year’s Eve in Abuja.
These terrorist bombings have now confirmed our worst fears as Sunday Dare concluded that the final script of the terrorists is unfolding now.
The Maitatsine uprising in Kano in 1980 whilst I was a high school pupil in Lagos could be called the genesis of what is now known as the Boko Haram uprising. The first ethno-religious crisis began in Jos on September 7, 2001, but the ethno-religious indigene/settler dichotomy is deep-rooted in the history of Jos as explained in “Sliding towards Armageddon: Revisiting Ethno-Religious Crises in Nigeria” by Gwamna Dogara Je’adayibe, Ph.D. and Amango Kudu A., Ph.D.
You should also read “The Truth About the Religious Violence in Jos, Nigeria” by Craig S. Keener published in
Christianity Today and posted on
www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010.
How and when it started is good to know, but in the present state of emergency as our house is on fire, who started it, what started it or when it started is not the most urgent thing, but to put out the fire by all means possible and at all costs to save our home from being destroyed by these conscienceless elements of the lunatic fringe on rampage. This is the responsibility of our government.
Our President was more concerned about his egocentric presidential election campaign and forgot to put his house in order until his kinsmen bombed the Eagle Square venue of our 50th Independence Anniversary in the Federal Capital city of Abuja. That was the first time such a catastrophe would happen to us since our freedom from the colonial British Empire on October 1, 1960. But he failed to correct the terrible mistakes of his security agencies and intensified his presidential election campaign gimmicks until the turbaned lunatics of the Boko Haram sect set off their deadly bombs in Jos, Maiduguri and Abuja over the holidays.
The devastating terrorist bombings have rocked the foundation of our house and put us all at risk, because it may collapse if we fail to get rid of these lunatics in our house.
We do not have enough specialists to handle these madmen. Our elites are disillusioned and as the madmen are raising dust in the north and blowing embers in the south, our children are in fear and trembling in the premonition of another civil war.
“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
— Psalm 11:3
The righteous should not give up!
The righteous can do a lot to salvage it, no matter the collateral damage that has been done.
KARL Maier, our house is a house of wonders.
Our children are still full of dreams as they are going on with life with tall ambitions and many of them with their heads in the clouds reaching out for the stars.
As the lunatics were exploding deadly bombs of destruction in the north, our ignorant children were exploding firecrackers of celebration in the south.
No Karl, it is not funny. It is the irony of life.
You cannot live in denial of the agonies of the ironies of life in a hostile universe.
Yes, we have our dreams and those who have dreams, also have their nightmares.
This is the burden of humankind.
We all must experience the checkered fortunes of the vicissitudes of life.
You have come across what the Chinese said about our fate on earth.
Joys and sorrows, partings and reunions are daily occurrences in the vicious circle of life.
Both our joys or sorrows do not last forever, and life goes on.
Our worst enemies are not even these terrorists, but the corrupt looters in the corridors of power and their accomplices, the political contractors and their cronies and hypocritical beneficiaries.
These kleptomaniacs are the anathemas of our nation.
They have done worse things to us than all the bomb blasts and ethno-religious riots since 1960 to date.
Do you know the casualties of road accidents on the nightmarish roads they have failed to repair after their embezzlement of the revenue allocations of the ministry of works?
Can you count the millions of lives lost since these kleptomaniacs rigged their way into the corridors of power?
Pensioners have collapsed while waiting for the arrears of their unpaid gratuities.
Patients have died from bad health care and when doctors went on strike, because of bad conditions of service.
Have you forgotten the 60 students of Loyola Jesuit College, Abuja and others who perished in the ill-fated Sosoliso plane that crashed at the Port Harcourt airport, because the fire service had no water to put out the fire?!
Thousands of students have been driven to crime and prostitution in frustration and desperation caused by collapse of our educational system.
We have lost count of the casualties of corruption.
Corruption is the systemic destruction of our nation by these devils posing and posturing as humans in our midst and they are breeding their kind daily.
We have to take out the lot of them to end the systemic rot plaguing our nation.
No matter how shaken we are by these horrors of terrorism, even if all other things fall apart, we shall remain one nation under the sun and like the Leaning Tower of Pisa that has survived many upheavals over the centuries, we shall remain standing and towering over the enemies of our progress and as long as God helps us to bear the pillars thereof, our nation will never fall.
So, as they sing in Croatia,”Još Hrvatska ni propala”, we shall sing in our dialects that our house has not yet fallen and will never fall.
January 5, 2011 —
Dear Nigerians, Only The Best Is Good Enough For UsOnly the best is good enough for us.
— Bishop Samuel Adjai (Ajayi) Crowther (c. 1807 – December 31, 1891)
I doubt if you and I would have been here if Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther had not been kidnapped by Muslim Fulani Slave hunters at the age of 12 in 1821. If Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther had not been exchanged for a horse in a slave trade by barter and later sold to the Portuguese slave traders, Providence would not have rescued him from the Portuguese slave ship, the Esperanza Felix, through the British anti-slavery warships, the Myrmidon and Iphigenia. Bishop Samuel Jayi Crowther would not have been the translator of the Holy Bible into Yoruba language and compiled a Yoruba dictionary with a grammar book between 1843 and 1850.
Most Igbos are ignorant of the historical fact that the first book in Igbo,
Isoama-Ibo, a primer, was written in 1857 by Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Then, Bishop Ajayi Crowther wrote a primer in the Nupe language in 1860, and a full grammar book with vocabulary of the Nupe in 1864.
Nigeria has not appreciated the great legacy of Bishop Ajayi Crowther in the history of modern civilization and the nation building of Nigeria.
The legacy of knowledge is the greatest heritage to bequeath to every age.
The ignorance of the lessons of history is often responsible for the prevalence of decadence in the society, because we have failed to learn the lessons of life from the tragic mistakes of the past.
How do we learn from the lessons of history when most of us are non-literates or intellectual illiterates and intellectual hypocrites?
Those who cannot read and write are over 76 million in Nigeria and those who can read and write, but fail to learn the vital lessons of life from reading and writing have worsened the calamity of the Nigerian society by being bad examples for the illiterate majority.
The so-called Nigerian elites are the intellectual illiterates and intellectual hypocrites.
They are mostly graduates of the tertiary schools, but they behave like primitive natives.
Like a bank manager whose unhygienic manners are so repulsive that you wonder if he ever saw the four walls of a university.
Many of them have very dirty toilets that you cannot feel comfortable whenever you visit them.
Others cannot converse in English without making you question their knowledge of the language.
I know one man who is 25 years old and a student in one of the Nigerian polytechnics, but he could not read the essay I wrote when I was only 13. The appalling state of Nigeria is caused by the prevalence of academic decadence, intellectual ignorance or what I prefer to call intellectual illiteracy.
Nigeria today is a nation of intellectual illiterates and intellectual hypocrites.
How do we define intellectual illiteracy?As described by Christopher Lasch in
The New Illiteracy:
“Mass education, which began as a promising attempt to democratize the higher culture of the privileged classes, has ended by stupefying the privileged themselves. Modern society has achieved unprecedented rates of formal literacy, but at the same time it has produced new forms of illiteracy.”
Christopher Lasch was addressing a similar problem in America.
He noted that the standards of academic education have been deteriorating even at the Ivy League universities.
He made references to falling standards at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia, while the undergraduates and graduates of these highly esteemed universities are still posing and posturing as status symbols of privilege and prestige in the hypocritical American society and the less privileged are being fooled by their conceit and deceit, because they cannot tell the difference.
An illiterate or semi-literate cannot tell the difference between the literati and dilettanti.
Mr. Lasch said a faculty committee at Harvard reported:
“The Harvard faculty does not care about teaching”.
According to a study of general education at Columbia, teachers have lost “their common sense of what kind of ignorance is unacceptable”.
As a result, “Students reading Rabelais’s description of civil disturbances ascribe them to the French Revolution. A class of twenty-five had never heard of the Oedipus Complex — or of Oedipus.
Only one student in a class of fifteen could date the Russian Revolution within a decade.”“
— Christopher Lasch / The New Illiteracy.
The situation in Nigeria is worse.The terrible state of Nigerian universities can be traced to the ignorance of previous leaders who misappropriated the revenue allocations meant for the sustainable development of higher institutions in Nigeria and neglected the welfare of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the students.
Nigerian universities have been relegated to the bottom of the accredited universities in the world.
No Nigerian university is even rated among the best 1, 000 universities in the world and only one Nigerian university ranked among the top 50 universities in Africa at the 44th position.
Nigerian administrators neglected Nigerian universities, sent their children to the best colleges and universities in America and the UK, and then misappropriated revenue allocations to establish their own private universities. But none of their private universities even made the list of the best universities in the world in the latest global rankings. One of the best private universities in Nigeria, the Christian Covenant University is at the bottom of the rungs in Africa at the 98th Position.
Establishing private colleges and universities is not the solution to the falling standards of education in Nigeria, but making sure that the public colleges and universities are well equipped with the basic facilities and utilities, such as modern classes, laboratories, hostels with clean toilets and qualified academic staff. Most of the teachers and lecturers in Nigerian secondary schools, colleges and universities are not certified teachers.
Having a degree is not enough qualification to teach.
The teachers must be certified like the graduates of accountancy who must be certified by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) before they can become competent professional accountants.
When the academic faculty is already faulty, then the quality of education will not be up to the required global standards.
Poor teachers will produce poor students.Before anyone can teach, you must have a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university.
You must have completed teacher training through an approved program and you must have successfully completed the appropriate teacher certification tests for the subject and grade level you wish to teach
Investigations have shown that many of the teachers in Nigeria cheated to pass their exams and ‘dubbed’ projects to earn their diplomas and degrees.
When they fail to get the dream jobs in banks or oil companies, they turn to the private schools, colleges and universities springing up daily and they are often employed by these institutions that are in desperate need for tutors to teach the thousands of boys and girls already given admission.
These private institutions have already charged exorbitant school fees in thousands of naira like the so called elitist schools charging over a million naira per session for a single pupil in Nigeria!
The private schools are all over the place, competing with the churches for every available space in the towns and cities in Nigeria.
To know how phony they are, you can hardly find them in the rural areas where education is needed most.
They are all after the money.
Hypocrites and exploiters of the ignorant masses.
Opening private schools and churches are the fastest get-rich quick schemes in Nigeria today.
To find out the truth, cross check the academic qualifications of the teaching staff and compare them with the standard criteria for teachers in America and the UK.
Many of them will fail the common examination for the certification of teachers.
Dr. Suleiman Kano, ASUU President, in a news report by the Nigerian Tribune on June 17, 2007, said:
“I think we should ask ourselves this pertinent question. Do we want to produce graduates for the sake of doing so or we want to produce quality graduates? In the latest ranking of world universities, no Nigerian university made the list of the first 1,000 in the world. This is because of the rot in the system. The government should address the issue and rid the system of the rot. Proscribing ASUU will not solve the problem.”
This is a country where the government itself says we need 47,000 university lecturers, now we have 16,000. What are we doing about getting the balance? Good students do not want to join academic staff; they prefer to work elsewhere. Many medical students do not get to see, let alone use, the equipment they will need when they start practice. What kind of graduates are we producing?”
The rot in Nigerian education did not start yesterday, but decades ago. The falling standards can be traced to the late 1970s as chronicled by Professor Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike in his novel,
Expo’ 77 published in 1981.
I am afraid that the same Nigerian secondary school pupils who engaged in the scandalous examination malpractices of the late 1970s and were never prosecuted are now the masterminds of electoral malpractices and perpetrators of other horrible and terrible crimes of corruption, the plague of the nation.
As Jesus Christ said, by their fruits you shall know them.
Millions of Nigerians have been studying and graduating from Nigerian colleges and universities and yet most of them are still intellectual illiterates and intellectual hypocrites, because they have been going to school for the wrong reasons.
The first reason is for the mere acquisition of paper qualification for the sole purpose of social class struggle in their pursuit of titular status symbols of the social class hierarchy.
To secure a dream job, earn a seven-digit salary, acquire a dream house, a dream car and to crown it all, acquire a dream wife or simply marry a woman to bear children who will bear their name and survive them when then die. Finis. Most of them are not thinking of how the acquisition of modern academic or professional education can be the best application for the advancement of modern civilization and as a vital tool for the nation building of a New Nigeria in the leadership of Africa in the comity of nations in the world.
We have over 20 million graduates of Nigerian colleges and universities who can boast of having first and second degrees and that they have written excellent papers, but they cannot boast of other practical achievements we can actually use as indices of sustainable human development in Nigeria.
Most of them leave no other legacies than their domestic liabilities.
The majority of Nigerians contributing more to the GDP and GNP are those without any academic qualification.
The Nigerian farmers, traders and artisans and not the Nigerian bankers, lawyers, engineers and their fellow so-called educated elites.
The majority of these so-called educated elites are also the leading intellectual illiterates and intellectual hypocrites posing and posturing with false airs and graces, because most of them cannot tell the difference between Chris Abani and Helon Habila or even tell what makes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie different from Sefi Atta in contemporary Nigerian literature.
Do not waste your time asking them why nobody won the last Nigeria LNG Prize for Science, because they will disappoint you. Yet, they can tell you the names of all the players in the first team of Arsenal Football Club or Manchester United Football Club of England. They can also tell you the full details of bizarre ****ographic scenarios of the last Big Brother Africa on cable TV and their fellow intellectual illiterates aping American Pop idols on SoundCity and Channel O and corrupting the ignorant and naïve Nigerian teenage boys and girls with their psychedelic and ****ographic songs and musical videos.
The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has failed to regulate what to broadcast and what should not even be authorized on any radio or television in Nigeria.
The Nigerian lawmakers are busy fighting and slumping over contracts on how to embezzle the revenue allocations and other public funds, so they are still confused about how to address the problems of governance in Nigeria.
The same intellectual illiterates and intellectual hypocrites are in the Nigerian banks, oil companies, insurance companies, and other corporations, so they cannot address the decadence in Nigerian education and social infrastructures. In fact, they are exploiting the situation like the capitalists fishing in the troubled waters in the Niger Delta.
The banks employ the prettiest female graduates to be trained and used as marketing executives and sent on the mission to hook millionaires to deposit their millions of naira and dollars in their banks. They do not care if the monies were stolen or not.
One of these hot legs employed by one of the banks at the zenith of Nigerian banking met me in the office of a young millionaire and was shocked at first sight.
Why was she shocked?
I knew her as the first daughter of strict Christian parents and here she was soliciting for the favour of a young millionaire who was happily married. She was already willing to date and mate with him. He confided in me that she was sexually harassing him and guess what?
She was already engaged to be married to a man who thought he was lucky to have found such a young woman as his fiancée.
What an unforeseen romantic tragedy.
For more, go to
http://www.amazon.com/In-House-Dogs-ebook/dp/B0065KCBE2~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima
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