By Ali Tijjani Hassan
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”
– Nelson Mandela.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”
– Benjamin Franklin.
Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. And can be shared through these methods: teaching, training, storytelling, discussion and directed research.
Lawmakers, in every state are elected to represent the interest of a particular society, and bring dividend of democracy to them.
Just of a recent, a certain Lawmaker who happen to be the Chairman House Committee on Tertiary Education, in his effort to feed his community with such dividend of Democracy raised a motion in which he suggested The public Universities Should be PRIVATIZE, so that the concern of the Federal government would be only on Polytechnics and Colleges of Education. In his word, they have many problems with academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU)”
I felt extremely bewildered and strained not with his statement but the support and applauding of his hopeless colleagues, I may not be wrong if I said those so called lawmakers know nothing about the suffering of the masses they are representing.
Actually, the lawmaker that proposed the bill not know the rate of poverty and how poor’s kid managed to have even thr basic education, which is their their fundamental rights, since that he came from the family of three times Head of State.
It could be that he didn’t go far and beyond in mode of both realistic and strategic thinking which may help him to encode and capture the consequences or repercussions of his illusion.
Before we are seeing this outburst, we were seeing him as an icon with communal mind and a hope of Young Nigerian that are into politics, but this his outburst cast doubt on our mind on electing another Youth to represent our Society!
As a matter of fact, we can simply view the term “Privatisation of Universities” as a strong bolt for locking the educational door to the children of a common man. Whereas the capitalist Edu-preneurs could be given the room to be in possession of the System, just like how they hijacked the ELEMENTARY system.
When a poor’s kid is not able to be enrolled in the University where he can study diligently to have a good result and applied their learnt knowledge to invent something that pull the Nation up to heavens, how is he suppose to live this miserable life while the Son of the elites are just in the system to gain the certificate that may allow them to run their bequeathed business?
As he said, they have much problem with ASUU. But in my view the problem is truly there, but unfortunately the government are not willing to solved it, for they can’t fulfilled, honoured, or even respect the elaborated agreement made by the negotiation committee to ASUU.
I vigorously believed that if they honoured these agreements our university systems could become animated and got the international standards recognition.
Someone can say that the battle that ASUU are fighting is for the betterment of their own selfish and life greed, but to me they deserved a better life.
I believe in world richest man words “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important”.
– Bill Gates
Nigeria is economically, politically, technologically, and academically among the underdeveloped countries while it’s not working toward meeting the developed Nation
This can easily be comprehend if we look at how the educational sector is treated.
Let me close my article with the word of famous freedom fighter, Malcolm X;
“Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today”.