Since the naira began to fall like the Tower of Pisa and President Muhammadu Buhari adamantly maintained what he would not do (rather than state what he will do), Nigerians have undertaken the praiseworthy initiative to rescue their country. By now you would have heard of the#BuyNaijatogrowtheNaira campaign initiated by Senator Ben Murray Bruce on Twitter. If you check out the hashtag on Twitter, you will find politicians like Senate President Bukola Saraki and Murray-Bruce himself making a show out of buying cars locally assembled by the Innoson Group.
There is also an ongoing debate taking place between Nigerians, who have keyed into the patriotic sentiment of the campaign urging us to buy from ourselves so that we can build the local economy, and a disproportionately few dissenting voices pointing out that what ails the country is far more complicated than this naiveté playing out on social media in oversimplified episodes.
There is a well-reasoned and analytical critique of the campaign – why the patriotic drive engineering this campaign can only drive it so far. What Nigeria needs, critics argue, is a broader strategic and overarching plan that conjoins well-meaning intentions with practical efforts, and an overall re-engineering of the social and cultural DNA that not only sees to our reorientation but guarantees a cultivated sense of responsibility.
My reservation about the whole affair is that Nigerians will surf this wave as long as the economy is down. But, as soon as things improve, we will go back to our old ways without actually altering anything about ourselves.
To the already sound arguments around the #BuyNaija campaign, I will like to add one more point: the imperative of quality public education. Of all the most urgent tasks before this government, this ranks at the top of the pile for reasons I shall be highlighting.
Some weeks ago, WAEC released the SSCE results and as usual, a high percentage of students performed poorly. This time, however, the media reported the story with an ethnic bait: the South-East (followed by the South-South) outperformed other regions in the country.
Now everyone knows that in Nigeria, the easiest way to muddle issues and redirect people’s attention from the things that really matter is to introduce aspects of region and religion. By reducing the essential data on WAEC results to ethnicity, triumphalism and its counter – defensiveness took centre-stage, thus, obfuscating the more important fact that what the commentators on all sides are busy contesting with so much passion and virulence is merely a local championship trophy.
Nigeria’s education, if the truth must be said, is too dysfunctional to confront the present challenges. As constituted at present, we will be forever regressed and unable to solve our basic problems without issuing Macedonian calls to advanced societies.
As Murray-Bruce’s army of flag wavers push us to cultural pride through local patronage, one thing to keep in mind is that there is nothing we can become as a nation without quality education. The feverish compulsion for the nation to look inwards, to celebrate local efforts, to walk through the thorny paths of local patronage to technological advancement, as other nations (like China) have done, can become blinders that shield us from the truth of our situation.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across a Youtube link posted by Channels TV, which featured a news segment titled ‘Eyewitness Report’. The video, titled ‘Gifted Nigerian Invents Flying Mini-Aircrafts’, was a 16-minute feature that unabashedly praised a young man from Delta State who had “invented” mini airplanes. For the first few minutes, I thought it was some kind of joke – only for me to find that the reporter, Chris Ilems, was serious!
The reporter spent considerable time on this ‘inventor’ while – inevitably, I suppose – lamenting a country that failed to patronise its local resources. The inventor himself described how he had been working on mini-airplanes for over 17 years and how he finally could make them fly. At some point, he mentioned his disdain for academic institutions (he did not attend a university) because “you need more than principles and theory to bring things out.” His ignorance notwithstanding, that statement was an indictment of Nigerian education as vague and disconnected from realities.
For a while after the report ended, I found myself saddened by the young man who had spent so many years of his life merely re-inventing the wheel. The Wright brothers, who pioneered aviation technology, already went farther than this a century ago. This young man has not improved on the silence; he only embarrassed it. Between the time that the ‘inventor’ started researching and working on making his toy planes fly, the world has advanced aviation technology.
There is another story on social media about a young man in Sokoto State who “invented” a toy car and whose governor offered a scholarship to go to the United States to learn automobile engineering. There is so much wrong with this kind of thinking that to start breaking it down would be patronising of enlightened readers of this page.
On Youtube, there are some videos of Nigerians who have ‘invented’ all manner of crude contraptions that are either already outmoded or currently being produced somewhere else in a far more refined mode. The puzzling part is the number of journalists who promote these Made-in-Nigeria ‘inventions’ with fanatic fervour, in the spirit of celebrating local technological initiatives, as if there is indeed something to them. When people are desperate for heroes, they will do anything, including celebrating mediocrity, as if it is genuine cultural renaissance.
Let me acknowledge that the various attempts at inventions are borne out of enthusiasm by these Nigerians. Although they have been mostly shortchanged by the Nigerian educational system all their lives, they have spent time and resources working on their ideas because they are driven by a similar instinct that once pushed men and women who pioneered scientific and technological advancement. However, like Apostle Paul, I can testify that they have zeal, but it is starved of requisite knowledge.
For one, even by our rather low local standards, many of them are not even breaking new grounds or extending the frontiers of knowledge. During the Nigerian Civil War, Biafran scientists did a far more laudable job. The war museum in Umuahia, Abia State, is full of relics that attest to this. The late Professor Ayodele Awojobi made a car that was supposed to be useful to the Nigerian Army in war situations. If, after these past years, Nigeria’s ‘neo-inventors’ can still not do far better than them, then we need to face up to the fact that our educational system is defective rather than pretend that it is possible to derive any major engineering breakthrough from it. Our governors especially need to own up that a lot of their populist education policies are not generating meaningful results.
#BuyNaija or not, cultural advancements are not based on mere good intentions but overall usefulness and contribution to larger culture. As things are, the world is advanced to the point that no country needs to start its technological exploitation from ground zero, but by jumping off what others have made or are currently making. Otherwise, we might as well invent the steam engine all over again. That is why we need to suspend our outpouring of patriotic emotions so that it does not impede reasonability.
Beyond the current high of growing the naira through patriotic patronage is the more urgent need of growing our mental resources. If, nearly five decades after the civil war, Nigeria is still only producing crude implements, then our educational system needs a complete overhaul. Otherwise, at this rate, we will remain on the same spot for another 50 years, still celebrating meaningless achievements that nobody will ever buy; only because they are slapped with a made-in-Nigeria label.
PUNCH
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