Unfortunately, up to this moment, our thinking, orientation, practice and conditions as well as the basic and mental reasons why education is in place, go back to those early times. Education was and still is imported into not only Nigeria but the rest of Africa. To us, importation of education has the same negative prospects to us as the importation of our daily consumable goods, like food, clothes, utensils, home and office equipments, medical drugs and health facilities and many others.
But education as a human endeavour is simply a tool of shaping, changing and modifying the world around us for the solution of today’s problems where the problems exist, and starting and ensuring the shapes of the future. Forging the future requires human ingenuity and skill. Manpower planning approach is based on the need to promote growth through the availability of skilled and determined manpower, the outcome of which will be the benefit to national, state or local citizens. Manpower skills are the important inputs of society, not just presentation of paper qualification, in other words doing something and not showing something.
To emphasize this point, let me quote what former president of Jamaica, Michael Manley once said about education: “The central truth remains that education is a political agent because it must either tend to preserve the status quo or promote change, depending on how it is organized, who organizes it and the purpose for which it is put.”
Therefore, if Nigeria and indeed Africa, wants to change its status of a consumer of everything from everywhere else, there must be change in education orientation, concept, vision and practice. We must throw English out. If we continue to depend on English, French or other European languages to know and understand our own world, the changes will never happen.
Now in a global world, we are only consumers of concepts, thinking and materials. If we don’t change, the next 100 years of our existence will continue to make us a people who copy, not who invent, who innovate, who initiate, who control and who are self-satisfying. Please, remember that during the last 300 – 400 years we have been enslaved and exported as labour in the first phase. Then we were colonized later after the enslavement. Now we are reduced to a world of globalisation, which means competition among those who can, and who do create technology and subdue and control of those who only beg for and copy.
I strongly feel that we must recall and respect what the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (SAW) said to his followers when Islam was revealed to him. His first teaching to them was to read and learn.
Later, he asked them to be able and ready to travel as far as China, the farthest place in the world then and learn from them whatever was worth learning. In obedience to this, Muslim scholars went to all places of knowledge, India, China, Greece, Persia and Syria and learnt everything that was worth learning. Whatever they learned, they translated everything into the Arabic language in speech and writing.
By the time of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, namely 661 AD to the 12th Century, they expanded and modified all areas of knowledge and scholarship. In Bagdad, two internationally-dignified universities of Mustansiriyah and Nizamiyyah were established. At the same time, they established eight universities in Spain and all scholars and intellectuals in Europe and other areas converged there to study knowledge areas of algebra, trigonometry, geometry, chemistry, physics, astronomy, medicine, including surgery, pharmacy, anatomy, metaphysics and heavenly bodies, everything in Arabic.
Towards the end of the 12th Century, Europeans noticed the weakness of the political powers of the Muslim empires and started to plan and ensure that the Muslim influence was chased out of Europe. This was the beginning of the European renaissance. The first thing the Europeans did was to intensify the gathering of large groups of intellectuals to get all the contemporary Arabic documents of knowledge and translate everything into the Greek or Latin languages.
By the year 1300, all the translation that was required was accomplished and all the available Arabic academic documents were ordered to be destroyed by burning. That was the beginning of the European line of thinking. That was the time some of the highest level universities were established, especially the University of Paris. Indeed, Oxford University took off in 1168, and Cambridge University in 1231. And that was how knowledge to us from the European thinking and cultural and environmental dominance took off.
In addition, please recall that we got independence from the Europeans in the 1960s along with the South-Eastern Asian countries. Their first and foremost strategy for development was taking, accepting and using one official native language in each country and that was where education, office work, national conference etc started and still persists. Due to this, the South-East Asian countries are not a developing world like Africa. In China and Japan, their native official languages were and still are the means of knowing and doing everything. This is the same in India and Pakistan.
It is hereby strongly believed and suggested that if Africa wants to become a competitor in world of technology and environmental thinking and productivity, foreign languages must be removed or remain only optional in our thinking and activities of life.
This is an excerpt of Dr. Abubakar’s speech presented at the 2010 Annual General Meeting of Birnin kudu Old Boys Association (BIKOBA) at Birninkudu Government College in Jigawa state on January 30, 2010
