By Abdullahi Suleiman Otiwe
Every effort in the development of the society will be meaningless if the bedrock system of education is not properly accommodated. In fact, the legend Nelson Mandela once said that education is the only legacy we can bequeath to society. Create it in a befitting institution and you will achieve its optimum impact.
In realising the importance of education we should not only ensure that it is freely given but that it has a sound basis in our constitution as primus inter pares, the derogation from it our lawmakers should be empowered to impeach the executives at all levels of government to ensure that education is among our immutable rights. Such will afford us the chance to have the type of educational system with maximum standard we hope for.
Let us imagine for a moment what would have become the fate of many students in our public institutions in Nigeria today whom the story of our schools is the experience of strike upon strike if they had that type of education I talking about.
A living witness of this is the case of Kogi state where for the past four months all the tertiary institutions in the state have been shutdown sending the potential future leaders of the state to the street. Such is an irony of the mandate for which the National Assembly is to discharge.
Over the years, Nigerian universities, polytechnics and colleges have been accused grossly of graduating students who are not better than primary school leavers.
Perhaps, I will be correct to allude this reality of Nigerian educational system to the ABU alumnus, Senator Dino Melaye, who is ‘doing well’ academically today.
Recently, the glorified college called the National Assembly, appointed Dino Melaye as its teacher on corruption to teach students of the Senate chamber in his field as corruption has become the main cause of myriad of misrule in this country.
What became a wide spread allegation to tarnish the image of the ‘Honourable Prof.’ was the public outcry that he never possessed the minimum requirement to be elected to the institution as he had claimed in his curriculum vitae. He was accused of not graduating from ABU despite the fact that he named his project supervisors and showed us his project documents.
This led his employer (the Senate) to invite the vice chancellor of his alma mater to come and testify for his former student. His VC presented his testimonial to the public stating that he actually graduated with a third class from the institution.
But one thing I discovered as the theme of the whole drama is that the third class graduate like his folks proved to be far better than the testimonial presented by his alma mater. Such is the failure of our educational system where students are usually the irony of their academic testimonials.
From my analysis of the failure of our educational system, corruption by the lecturers is the reason our universities have been unable to graduate students with best results. The chief method of the corruption by the lecturers is the victimisation of students. This is the insistence of the lecturers to sleep with the female students or a compulsory buying of textbooks by all the students, irrespective of their sex.
So, I doubt if the institution which appointed Dino Melaye as its teacher is not bound to produce some quack senate graduates because the teacher is guilty of the victimization of the students as cited above. The same teacher has published a textbook and I am sure the students would be compelled to buy it or they risk carrying over his course. I am sure they will give in because Corruption is a core course for both the students of Senate and the remedial students of the House of Representatives.
Justifying my assumption of graduating quack senate students and indeed the remedial students is the over ruling of the application of Ibrahim Magu who was seeking admission to the Presidency, an affiliate of the institute. Here is a man who merited all the requirements for the admission but the senate students however together with their teacher rejected the Magu’s application.
Here is a teacher who is learned in the field of corruption to the extent of publishing a book on it. He has just demonstrated that he was an anti-corruption campaigner until he made his way to the senate classroom.
In fact, he had delivered many papers on corruption in form of bills and motions. One of such recent papers is against the current governor of Kogi state who has actually kept some of the state workers without salaries for “a maximum of twelve months”.
Professor Dino Melaye, author of “Antidote for Corruption”, would soon become a best-selling author. However, let him account to Nigerians why Magu was never accepted by him and his tutored students to fight corruption for Nigeria he is claiming to serve.
The author should tell Nigerians why he has been acting as a correspondent for Bukola Saraki to the Code of Conduct Tribunal that is trying the former on corruption and other related offences. Whether he has been doing that to gather some material which enabled him to finish his latest book on corruption, Nigerians want to know.
Whatever might be his reason(s), he should remember that Nigerians expect much from him as a change agent. That is what actually gave him the late appointment to the university called National Assembly.
My appeal to the Directorate Office of Senatorial Studies headed by Bukola Saraki, the close paddy of the celebrated writer of corruption: he should make sure that Prof. Dino does not impose his textbook on the students which if they buy will definitely be at the expense of the sweat of ordinary Nigerians.
Otiwe wrote from Lokoja, Kogi state. Email: [email protected]
