Opinion: Nigeria desperately needs leaders of tomorrow

by Saatah Nubari

school pupils

Though there’s nothing wrong in being a musician, we should know that we can’t all sing. We also need our fair share of Einstein’s, Dora Akunyili, Charles Soludo, Nelson Mandela and Chinua Achebe, and we seem not to be getting that bigger picture yet.

Some weeks back, a friend of mine on Facebook had complained vehemently about our leaders—sorry, I meant to say our politicians, because we have few or no leaders. Her argument was that the present crops of politicians have been there since their youths, most of them have been in politics for 15, 20, and some for 30 years. She wrote down her disappointments with such hopelessness, but I could still see the hope in it. Nothing caught my attention more than the phrase; we “the leaders of tomorrow”. By this time, I paused.

I took a close observation of our youths (me included), and I couldn’t help but see our unpreparedness to rise up to the challenge of leading this nation and the continent as a whole. We have misplaced our priorities. We are more interested in being irresponsible, than taking up responsibilities. We are more interested in getting “high”, than having that sober reflection on what part we’ll have to play in the future. We are more interested in going to parties, than picking up our books and going to the lecture hall. We are more interested in getting the latest technological gadgets, than passing our exams. Librarians will soon go extinct because few people use the libraries these days. It is all about putting on the most expensive clothes and buying the most expensive drinks at parties. The funny thing is that, the money being spent on these frivolities are not even ours. We scheme and scam our way into parting with these sums from our parents, something we can’t work for.

We won’t take the blame alone, our politicians and parents have their fair share. Today you have some states having “2” as a pass mark to gain admission into the Federal Government colleges, and their counterparts in other state will have to score from 100 and above to get into the same school. We don’t need a prophet to tell us who will come last from JSS1 to SS3. What our politicians should know is that, this “educationally less developed” tag given to some states is actually doing less good. What we’re really doing is widening the gap between the “educationally developed” states and the “educationally less developed” states. By lowering the bar in the North and raising the bar in the South, you’re making the Northern pupils lazy and challenging the pupils from the South to do better. Like someone said, are the pupils who scored 2 going to write a different WAEC or NECO from the pupils who scored 135, or are they going to be given preferential treatment? When or if they get to the University, how will they cope? We always try to put in sentiments when we make decision like these, it won’t take us anywhere. What we have succeeded in doing is glaring. 10 to 15 years from now, when those pupils graduate from the University, we would have succeeded in graduating educated illiterates from the North, and educationally sound people from the South. Now tell me what good this massive difference will do for the country.

Let’s get back to talking about our nation’s future. ASUU is currently on strike, and you won’t know how bleak our future looks till you realize that about 90% percent of students are happy that their respective schools are on strike. Even those in private Universities who don’t experience strikes still wish they were part of it. We don’t read anymore shouldn’t be news, WAEC and NECO results these days are shameful. The just concluded JAMB exams was nothing to write home about, the senate had to even beg Universities to lower their aptitude test cut off mark to 180, this is even less than a C. we in the University are not better off. Why read when you can pay or sleep with your lecturer for better grades?  That’s the question we ask. We prefer the easy way to everything, that is why I ask, are our future Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Oby Ezekwesili on the streets at night, are they the ones lodged in expensive hotels by our politicians old enough to be their fathers, are they the ones who sell their body just to buy the latest phones or are they just not born yet. Where are our Chinua Achebe, Tafawa Belewa, Philip Emeagwalli and their likes, are they the ones being paraded everyday by the police, are they the ones in the forests being initiated into one secret cult or the other, are they in the night clubs every day or are do they just prefer to get “high’ since it’s in vogue, or are they just not born yet.

Like Ayokunle Odekunle pointed out in his article where he eulogized Prof. Achebe, he said he wished they (Achebe, Mandela and others like them) could run on batteries, so we wouldn’t lose them to the cold hands of death. His reason was that this present generation seemed lost and I can’t disagree with that. We have refused to rise up to the challenges ahead, gone are the days when “…everybody wants to write a book” now everybody wants to sing.  Though there’s nothing wrong in being a musician, we should know that we can’t all sing. We also need our fair share of Einstein’s, Dora Akunyili, Charles Soludo, Nelson Mandela and Chinua Achebe, and we seem not to be getting that bigger picture yet.

The days that followed, after reading that status update on Facebook was like soul searching. I had begun a quest to understand that phrase, though simple as it looks, I just had that feeling that something wasn’t right, and I think I figured it out and so much more. AyiKweiArmah didn’t mean the next MBGN, Mister Nigeria or Miss World when he said “the beautiful ones are not yet born” the beauty he was talking about was about leadership, something we don’t have and a challenge we should rise up to. As for the phrase “the leaders of tomorrow”, now I understand it. It is a broadcast to us telling us to prepare, saying there is a vacuum. But that’s not the problem, the problem is when we do feel the vacuum, are we going to be different?

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Saatah Nubari tweets from @saatah

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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