This is October, the month that Nigeria had her ersatz manumission from Great Britain. This is also the month in which the nation traditionally confers various categories of national honours on its deserving citizens and those of other nationalities for outstanding contributions to the growth and development of the nation. However, many of the names on the lists of those selected for the various categories of national honours this year have reminded me of an analysis once done by the late Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe in the late 1970s or so.
He had pointed out that, in a sense, Northern Nigeria was not at all backwards educationally. He said the Northerners had had the Islamic system of education and the Arabic language, both of which they had mastered. For the Northerners, therefore, western education, which the Southerners felt the Northerners were backwards in, was only an additional system; and that if the situation were reversed such that the Southerners were to add to the western education the Islamic system and the Arabic language, it would be then that the Southerners would realize how backwards they would be compared to their Northern brothers and sisters. Indeed, he spelt it out that the South would become more backwards than they thought the North was.
This is the only analogy one can use to understand what may have informed the inclusion of certain names in this year’s list of those deserving of national honours. No doubt there are some truly honourable names on the list, but one wonders what the name of the current minister of education should be doing in such a list when, under his watch, the nation’s universities have been shut down for over seven months and counting; when, under his watch as minister the nation’s universities have experienced the longest strikes and, at the secondary school level the performances of UTME candidates have fallen to an abysmally low level; when the nation has been wondering just why he and his colleague in the ministry of labour should still be ministers when they have evidently ruined the nation’s university system.
The only way to understand why these two men are still in government and why one or both of them should be honoured is to reverse one’s sense of direction from progress to retrogression as the ideology of this outgoing government. Thus, rewards of various kinds come to those who have done their very worst in dismantling the system. That’s the only way to understand the basis for some of the national honours for this year. And, given this change of direction, the least expected of men and women in the estimation of the electorate would become the very best in the reckoning of the regime. Let it be stressed that the thrust of this analogy is in the reversal and not by any means a suggestion that one system of education was better than, or inferior to, the other, though.
Somehow, too, Nigerians seem to have come to fall in line with this ideology and attitude of government and with this philosophy of honouring and respecting the most destructive and looters of the nation. One illustration is Nigerians’ general indifference to the recent public display of shame by the minister of labour during the meeting to resolve the ASUU strike called by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Gbajabiamila.
The Hon Minister, Dr Chris Ngige, did not only walk out on the meeting, as it was perceived by some of us, on his way out of the venue, he pounded the available back of the ASUU President, Dr Emmanuel Osodeke, with his fist with its usual assemblage of multipurpose rings that give his typical fist the outlook of a shrine, with his wild grove of a beard and reddish eyeballs to complete the picture. But although this was done publicly on national television, there have been no strident condemnations of this unwarranted resort to violence either by the mainstream or social media.
The violence was considered normal by Nigerians because it was the normal punch of a master on the available back of his slave. It was a headmaster’s or school principal’s choice of punishment for his or her stubborn pupil. But the nation’s mainstream and social media platforms would have been in conflagration by now if it had been the ASUU President who had displayed such ill manners in public and towards such a man of “honour”.
That’s why I feel Nigerians have generally come to accept this reversal of the wheel of the nation’s progress from moving forward to going backwards as displayed in whom to honour and in whose misdemeanours to pass over in silence even as it was done publicly. That’s why the back of a university professor leading the union of the nation’s academics would become a punching bag for a passerby monster of labour and Nigerians would see nothing wrong with the violence. We are now in reverse gear.
But, unless I didn’t check the list thoroughly enough, I didn’t see Dr Ngige’s name and the names of the bandits in the forests on the lists. If the names of these ones are truly not on the lists, then we should expect a supplementary list of names of men and women of national honours for this year. And it has to be this year because it’s most unlikely that Dr Chris Ngige will still have any genuine honour left with him by this time next year, just as it has happened to several before him. But, by about same time next year, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke would be a symbol of honour and respect by most Nigerians, including some of those who clapped for his assailant erstwhile monster of labour.
It cannot be over emphasized that this strike, like most previous strikes of our Union, was caused by the dishonourable conduct of government by failing to honour agreements freely entered with our Union. Hence, to resolve this unnecessarily protracted strike, integrity and honour are indispensable. That is the minimum we can accept even in the wake of the weaponisation of hunger against our members many of whom have already died.
As far as the union is concerned, the direction of the government, including that of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is not lost on its membership especially considering the Hon Speaker’s prejudicial-sounding pronouncement that all parties can’t be wrong and only one can be right. Neither do we expect miracles from the judiciary whose role Dr Ngige has been playing by ordering the Union to comply with court ruling even when he knows the Union has filed an appeal against the ruling. Here is an openly lawless man ordering others to be law-abiding!
But the Hon Speaker has forgotten that there was once a time the whole world was wrong in its understanding of the universe, and only the Greek Copernicus was right. Similarly, at another time the whole world was wrong and only Galileo Galilei was right. Still in another moment it was only Nostradamus that foresaw the future of humanity which the rest of humanity did not foresee.
Prof Joseph A Ushie
University of Uyo.