Give it to us as Nigerians; we love to hide under one finger even when the late MKO Abiola long told us that it is a doomed art. As a people, we are a long-suffering lot. We whine and wail the moment an underlying scandal unfurls instigating outrage in us. Conscientious individuals know that criminals live among us. Sometimes, we shield them because we are afraid of reprisal attacks and at other times because their activities have spared us.
Suddenly we are outraged by the suspicious death of 12-year-old Sylvester Oromoni Junior at Dowen College. The school claims its religious foundation precludes it from endemic cultism that we know exists in most schools. This presumption insults and assaults the intelligence of anyone who has pushed through a child in any school in Nigeria in the last 20 years.
The moment we sold public education into commercial hands, we cemented the foundation of morality and value-based education. If proprietors have morals, they would not work with dubiously wealthy and powerful parents. As they say here, when steel and steel meet, one must bend for the other. The moment we accepted that everything government runs turns to dust, we opened the market for privileged individuals to create an avenue for cultism to take root, grow and thrive. Inequality and non-standardization always gives room for the growth of class privilege.
In our clime, privilege creates bragging rights for parents to express their status by the type of education they could give their children. Villagers like us that attended community schools would hardly rub shoulders with our counterparts who went to private schools for anything in our society. We were graduated to roam the streets while their jobs were waiting for them.
We could cast our minds back to the era when the rumour of education inspectors arriving at public schools instilled discipline in both staff and students. Classrooms were cleaned; blackboards repainted, even the stones outlining the school compound were whitewashed as the surrounding grass was trimmed. Headteachers and instructors cleaned up their acts because their promotions were based on the evaluation by these inspectors.
Those were the days of uniformity. Unfortunately, communality rhymed with communism hence the need to liberalise the education system. Liberalism means throwing everything to market forces where the wallet or purse determines access to quality. Proprietors knew they could bribe their way into establishing super centres of excellence just to skew exam results in their school’s favour.
In most states, religion and not excellence determines who could own and run schools in different parts of Nigeria. We often close our eyes to these issues but we know it’s true and that it leads to unhealthy rivalry and not quality. Accreditation is sustained by artificial results or what the ‘inspectors’ consider to be in the best interest of the political apparatchik in any particular state.
Where is the outrage each time we are confronted with pupils learning under trees, using cement blocks as tables or writing under broken ceilings? Where is our outrage when teachers’ salaries are not paid as and when due while politicians allocate to themselves huge allowances for doing nothing? When was the last time we reviewed the educational curriculum in public schools to bring them to par with modern requirements? When was the last time the best students emerged from a community school? Where is our outrage as we watch our alma maters unable to maintain five subjects in schools?
We created room for educational apartheid when we abandoned public schools for the rat race of privileged education to the highest bidder. We locked the gates against potential because of the social status of parents. Even our president endorsed those who could afford it to choose overseas education to what his administration offers. He also led by example – all his children graduated from overseas universities.
As a beneficiary of half-baked public education, I remember passing through a system that promoted equal access to what was available for every child in school. Those were the days when a child pissed his pants when a parent threatened to report them to their teacher. Today, teachers are told they could not enforce discipline and those who challenge that order have paid dearly for it. Nobody supports excesses or abuse even back then, but indiscipline grows in young adults and matures in the larger society.
My last two kids went to some of the best schools of their day in Jos, Plateau State. We sacrificed every luxury to make provision for them. It’s been heartbreaking to learn that they suffered different forms of abuse. Seniors, supervisors and teachers took turns to swoop on their provisions the moment we turned our backs from school. The children always looked gaunt when we visited or picked them up after each session but we attributed that to the change in environment. We had no idea they were threatened to death not to disclose their ordeal at home.
Their reminiscences would break the hearts of any parent especially imagining the incalculable damage bullying does to the psyche of these children. Teachers treated their pupils based on the generosity of parents, not the fees that parents paid. The money goes to fund the ostentatious lifestyles of proprietors while teachers go broke. There is zero supervision or auditing of what goes on in classrooms or at night in their hostels. We provided cardigans but they were randomly exposed to the chill of Jos. We paid for bed space but they were often made to sleep on springs to bathe in cold water and often starved too.
Where children are randomly terrorised and starved by peers, cultism becomes an escape route to protected living. Cultists look out for the welfare of each other. And yes, cultism exists even in the religious arena; you only need to get closer to know how religious leaders acquire their massive influence on society. The presumption that a school‘s religious foundation insulates it against cultism is a mirage. It is shameful that it has taken Oromoni to unearth this level of outrage in us.
We created unity schools to foster togetherness, but where is unity in Nigeria? We formed the NYSC to integrate component parts of Nigeria but the wealthy and the connected randomly break the system to secure privileged postings and exemptions for their wards. We created federal character for inclusion, but it has become a weapon to be abused in appointments and promotions. A society sustained on inequality cannot generate equity anywhere.
Poor Sylvester would have died in vain if his uncle had accepted the lie. It is sad to say that justice would still elude him. Potential investigators could be grand patrons of cults themselves.
One way to return to an egalitarian and functional educational system, is to create a standardised educational system for all. But the genie for that possibility has been let out of the bottle. It is outrageous that we pretend to be outraged by what we daily tolerate. Every day in our society, men in uniform, paid for by taxpayers, assault the same taxpayers with impunity. They are often paid to harass civilians. Where did they learn that?
Painfully, nothing we do now would bring Sylvester back to his parents or – prevent more cultists from making more Sylvesters of helpless children.
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