Opinion
- Editorial- Commentary
Morgan
Job: The
big education story
Prime Minister Patrick Manning plans to give away
millions of dollars to rogue regimes in West Africa.
Not a single editor or journalist has questioned
the wisdom of taking money from poor people in
Trinidad to hand it to vagabonds, thieves and Kleptokrats
in West Africa's oil rich but failed states, places
such as Chad, Equatorial Guinea, or Nigeria. Nigeria
is an embarrassment called a country where the
political leadership is devoted to looting. After
earning nearly US$400 billion in the past 30 years,
at least 70 per cent of Nigerians live on US$1.00
per day, or less!
A
Nigerian journalist wrote last month in language
reminiscent of Tutuola or Achebe: "Poverty
is ubiquitous, and unemployment pervasive. Our
country suffers infrastructural decay, epileptic
power supply, absent pipe bourne water, non-availability
of good and enduring housing policy, highways in
a deplorable state of disrepair, life is so cheap
as there is general insecurity in the land, standard
of education declining, conditions in hospitals
worse than mere consulting clinics as there are
no drugs and the doctors have gone to Europe, America
or the Middle East in search of the proverbial
Golden Fleece; Oil provides 20 per cent of GDP,
95 per cent of foreign exchange, and 65 per cent
of Government revenue, agriculture is abandoned.
Nigeria is thus a mono-cultural, dependent economy
in a permanent crisis of various sorts, which is
epileptic to the vagaries of international oil
price shocks and instability."
Honest Nigerians blame greed and criminal politicians,
not colonialism, or slavery, or the slave trade
for the rampage a corrupt elite has inflicted on
their unfortunate country. Without consultation,
Mr. Manning plans dump our money into that black
hole of moral squalor and cultivated political
banditry.
Renowned
economist, Professor Eghosa Osagie, says the
continued decline in the Nigerian economy since
the 1990s is being compounded by bad leadership
and arbitrary remedial measures: "It is grossly
unfortunate that Nigeria already considered a middle-income
economy in the 1970s degenerated to the status
of a low-income economy in the first decade of
the 21st century". The professor of economics
said that for 25 years (1982-2007) the Nigerian
economy has been trapped in a major crisis of under-performance.
Again, he pointed to other indicators of the problems
to include unprecedented poverty and unsustainable
external debt burden that has continued to siphon
scarce foreign exchange. He said that country must
embrace a restructuring that should involve Nigerians
at the grassroot level as producers and stakeholders.
He explained that serious attention must be given
to science and technology if the nation would increase
domestic production while an appropriate exchange
rate regime peculiar to the country's situation
should be put in place.
Many
areas of Trinidad fit the description of Nigeria,
and it would seem that Mr. Manning has
no problem with Trinidad becoming more like Nigeria
in Nigerian ways. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has
denounced former President Olusegun Obasanjo as
a deceptive face of a corrupt clique. Chinua Achebe,
whose opus magnum Things Fall Apart has sold more
than ten million copies in more than 50 languages,
has said Mr. Obasanjo suffers from "a flamboyant,
imaginary self concept. He lives in a world of
make believe and unrealistic expectations. In 1979,
Obasanjo said, "Nigeria, this great country
of ours, will become one of the ten leading nations
of the world by the year 2000."
"Nigeria
is not a great country. It is one of the most
disorderly nations in the world. It
is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient
places under the sun. It is dirty, callous, noisy,
ostentatious, dishonest, and vulgar. In short it
is one of the most unpleasant places on earth!
It is a measure of our self-delusion that we can
talk about developing tourism in Nigeria. Only
a masochist with an exuberant taste for self-violence
will pick Nigeria for a holiday; only a character
out of Tutuola seeking to know punishment and poverty
at first hand. No, Nigeria may be a paradise for
adventurers and pirates, but not for tourists."
Mr
Manning brought Mr. Obasanjo here to tell us, "The
Black race has no permanent seat on the UN Security
Council" and to develop tourist traffic from
Trinidad to Nigeria, in defiance of Achebe's logic.
Achebe's wisdom exposes the reason poor illiterate
people, PNM calypsonians and politicians, with
prominent journalists in Trinidad are in a conspiracy
to defend the PNM education as the best thing that
happened to Black people since Emancipation: "One
of the commonest manifestations of underdevelopment
is a tendency among the ruling elite to live in
a world of make-believe," (Achebe, The Trouble
With Nigeria, page 9).
Professor Max Richards, Dr St Clair King, Dr CV
Gocking are only three of many honest men who told
every PNM prime minister that secondary education
for the poor was an unmitigated disaster. PNM calypsonians
who are illiterate or badly damaged by their perverse
encounter with secondary education and journalists
who ignore the statistical facts they were never
taught at junior secondary or senior comprehensive
keep projecting their shame by denying the truth:
that they went to low status schools where the
probability of failure is often greater than 0.9,
almost certainty for too many.
The majority of adults in Trinidad and Tobago
are emotionally damaged by the years they were
processed through PNM free education in the government
secondary schools that exposed them to the futility
of their ambitions, in gang infested, libidinous,
promiscuous, drug environments where academic excellence
had little value while present gratification of
the flesh had more value than the present value
of years of deferred gratification that explains
the success of the minority who win a coveted place
in the traditional CIC, Hill view, Naps, Pres,
SAGHS, SJC, or other convent schools.
For
the majority of calypsonians, journalists, or
PNM fanatics defending their sub-standard and
destructive education, "Schooling has been
disabling. Their encounter with the curriculum
revealed their worst fears about themselves," (Jeniffer
Mohammed, School of Education, UWI). The education
system Mr. Manning claims has made Trinidad and
Tobago 98 per cent literate has done no such thing,
but produced a population mathematically illiterate
and beyond reasoning about the massive destruction
done at schools, immersed in a world of dragons
on the Red House, obeah, and racist anxiety promoted
by some PNM calypsonians. Murderers Dole Chadee,
Ramiah, Clint Huggins, and the girlfriend of one
of the killers were graduates of Curepe Junior
Secondary. The prison population and black on black
gang slaughter tell a story about the way junior
secondary education promotes violence as a response
to bitterness, hopelessness and a political party
that denied for 40 years that the majority of poor
children were being processed for destruction from
primary through government secondary school factories
that had more to do with political profit than
investing in quality human capital.
Mr
Orville London is embarrassed by Tobago SEA results.
He said, "People were calling me
from Trinidad to ask what was going on in Tobago." For
the Nth time Tobago was next to last among the
education districts in the SEA results. Tobago's
problem resides in the denial culture of Mrs. Hazel
Manning's ministry. The make-believe world that
allows Mr. Manning to ignore the 10,000 children
who went into secondary school to suffer every
year for the past 40 years, many emerging as PNM
fanatics, or racists, but illiterate and dangerous.
No amount of gas or oil money will save us from
a Nigerian fate if we cannot undermine the conspiracy
of journalists, calypsonians and PNM politicians
to ignore the big education story: the massive
waste of billions to produce an emotionally crippled
criminal, amoral, and largely illiterate population.
Dr.
Morgan Job was a university
economics lecturer and a former Minister
in the Ministry of Finance. Petroleumworld
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
Note: This article was first publish in Trinidad
Express, Wednesday, July 18th 2007. Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
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Petroleumworld
07/22/07
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