Education and voting wisely By Valentine Obienyem
THE PROSPECT OF EDUCATION AND THE NEED TO VOTE WISELY IN 2023 GENERAL ELECTIONS, BEING A PAPER PRESENTED BY MR. VALENTINE OBIENYEM AT THE GRAND FINALE OF ACTIVITIES MARKING THE SEND OFF CEREMONY OF SS3 STUDENTS OF HOLY GHOST ACADEMY, AMAOKPALA ON THE 2ND OF OCTOBER, 2022.
POLITICS DIGEST- I thank the management of this college for the invitation to share my experiences with the students of this great institution, both those being sent off today and those who are still part of this great institution. I am very much elated to note that the desire for you to understand the importance, and indeed, the need for education is at the foundation of this very invitation. I say this because a typical teacher, at this point, may ignorantly feel that the umbilical cord connecting you to the school is being severed and as such they will not care what becomes of you thereafter. The action of the management of the school shows continued interest in your progress, especially now that the crisis in our educational system might tempt some of you to question the utility or otherwise of education.
Having said the foregoing, permit me to request that each of you should ask yourself a question that would take all of you back to your first day in this citadel of learning: Why am I here or what did I come here to do? Answers would certainly differ because most of you are here because your parents desired that. At the average age of 11, you were perhaps too young to have contributed to your mission here. This takes us to the second question: Why did your parents bring you here or desire Holy Ghost Academy for you?
Not many of you are aware that Holy Ghost Fathers were amongst the first set of people that brought and nurtured education in Nigeria. Since then, they have not relented in the promotion of quality education as they do in the whole world. Interestingly, they now have their own university.
Holy Ghost Academy at Amaokpala, like all Catholic schools, have degrees of resemblance to the Seminary, where all-rounded formation is the key. This is one of the reasons the schools are often under the care of Rev Fathers and sisters. This is what your parents saw before desiring this school for you. These are some parents that were educationally constrained or have suffered one humiliation or the other because of limited education and thereafter vowed to give their children the best. They want their children to be greater than they are. They are thus interested in your academic and moral attainments. When we talk about academic attainment, we talk about education and its importance. We shall therefore try, even in passing, to look at what education is and what it does in our lives.
As far as we can pry into history, education remains one of those things that have agitated the minds of man because of its usefulness. Thus, Aristotle defines it as “the process of training man to fulfil his aim by exercising all the faculties to the fullest extent as a member of society.” The same Aristotle went on to say that the educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
Education is about the transmission of our heritage from generation to generation. It actually started with creation, because the command to man to conquer the earth would only come through the perfection and transmission of his heritage from generation to generation.
Without education our society would have been stagnant. If we did not learn and improve on what our fathers did, perhaps we would have remained at the hunting age. It is education and learning that enabled the world to transit from one age to another up till what we excitedly call “Computer or Digital Age.” Once a country or a people refuse to be educated, to move with the tide, the world will leave the person or the country behind. Do you want the world to leave you behind?
There is only one antidote to that – education. Its prospect is very key to our progress in society because it impacts on global development; helps us in our personal growth; enhances our curiosity; makes us better citizens; makes us become aware of our rights and responsibilities, among others.
But what is the best way to be educated? The wise one told us that education could be formal or informal. This is why it comes one fourth from travel, one fourth from experience, one fourth from others and one fourth from the teacher. All the sources are important but more fulfilling when they are all operational. Thus, even when you have the benefit of travel or experience, formal education is still important because it offers you the most potent tools for universal competition. This is what your parents realised by seeking an institution such as this for you. Having done their part, what are you required to do?
An Igbo adage says you can take a horse to a stream but cannot force it to drink. This school is the stream where your parents have taken you to. In school, besides what your teachers teach you, you have ample opportunity to learn so many things through interaction with your follow students, from your teachers, from interactions such as on-going now, even from pranks you play among yourselves. I am aware that you have given funny names to your teachers to suit their peculiar inclinations. I know for sure that some of you did bad things undetected. Some of you may have even tested the art of smoking cigarette and engaged in other related vices. This is when the pull towards vice is very strong, when those growing up do most things because their peers are doing same without a moment reflection about propriety. I often pardon youngsters that do such things because they are necessary accompaniment to adolescent lives. This is why the teachers are here to guide you and punish you when you stray from the paths of rectitude. When you do those things, the experienced teacher will look at you with understanding leniency. His aim is to correct you and point to you how such behaviour will ruin your lives if not stopped. What I highly condemn is when you remain becalmed in those vices.
What this means is that in spite of what the teacher teaches you in class, by merely staying in school, watching the characters of your formators, interacting with your fellow students, you will profoundly learn a lot about life. All the things you have learnt, for those being sent off today, should come handy in your future lives. This is where you are challenged to be the mirror through which others will see how good your school is. This means that you will enjoy a life-long relationship with your alma mater. Do you have your old boys?
What I want to tell you, and which I want you to consider as my central message is the fact that we become what we desire.(Use baptism – faith of the Church) Igbo people say “na onye kwe chi ya ekwe.” Holy Ghost Academy has done or is doing its part, your parents are doing their own part, but the rest depends on you. For those of you being sent off today, our question to you is : Quo Vadis? Which way? What next? This question was prompted by my encounter with a young teenager at Ochanja Market on Friday.
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I had taken my wife to market on Friday to buy some wears. As she was moving from shop to shop, I entered one shop where I met a teenager. I joked that President Muhammadu Buhari was dealing with them as I was almost sure he comes to market because of the strike. Behold the bombshell! The teenager told me that after his school certificate examination that he decided to trade. What was confounding was the fact that by the size of his father’s shop, one can almost surmise that his father can conveniently train him in school. I collected his number because I hope to engage him.
But my first, instinctual reaction to his revelation is itself instructive. “No, you cannot do this to yourself at this time and age,” I told him. I used Mr. Peter Obi as an example. I told him how, in spite his attainments, he still does short courses in one school or the other for continued self-improvement. This is in sync with Will Durant’s definition of education as the “progressive discovery of our ignorance.” What this suggests is that you should have the ever present thirst for education, because it solves one ignorance and opens us to another, thereby reducing our overall ignorance. If you are not educated at all, your ignorance is compounded. You become what our people call “iti mpataka” a simpleton who hardly knows the difference between left and right. You will become that uneducated man that Zeno saw sitting on a stone and said wryly of him: “Behold a stone sitting on another stone.”
What I have done so far is to convince you that your parents did not make mistakes. To convince you that even if you do not desire to be a lawyer or a doctor or a professional, you still need education for its own sake. It equips you to take the opportunity of life when it comes, by broadening your competencies and expanding the possibilities of what you can do. It is convenient to argue that some people make it without education, but the fact is that with education their successes will be many times magnified. If we care to even go behind the scenes, we shall see those who succeeded without education making a lot of sacrifices to acquire same privately, knowing that it remains key to their improvement.
The point we have been striving to emphasize is the need for you to further your education.
And now you will go to higher institutions, the sharpened competition among individuals will force you into intellectual specialties. Whatever course of study you will pursue, do not let yourselves be fragments or become subsumed in your course of study. Always make out time to acquit yourself with what I call flowers of civilization. Make friends with great poets – Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Soyinka; with great statesmen such as Winston Churchill, Zik, Awolowo, Peter Obi; with great thinkers – Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, Archimedes, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, Okey Ikechukwu; with great prose writers – Cicero, Seneca,Chuna Achebe, Chimamada; with great historians – Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon; and with great saints, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Aquinas. I shall not consider you educated unless you make many of these geniuses your friends. Cultivate them, and you will be molded by the company you keep.
We have talked at length about education, the need to acquire it and what it can do in our lives. But we must note, at this juncture, that education means nothing if it does not aid us to change our situations in life as individuals or a collectivity.
Now is not the best of times for Nigeria. Things are bad and the prospect of their becoming better soonest is doubtful. Some Nigerians think it is one of the effects of trusting our destiny to a man whose educational pedigree is doubtful. There is a crisis in Nigeria, but the only hope that keeps most Nigerians going is the prospect the forth coming elections hold as an opportunity for Nigerians to take back their country. Are you part of the movement?
Taking back the country is about enthroning responsible leadership that would restore the glory of the country and make it a better place for Nigerians. This is at the roots of the new movement. The only way to achieve this is by exercising our franchise in a responsible and responsive manner.
Everybody is exasperated about the condition of Nigeria. This must have informed the addition of the need to vote wisely in the 2023 general elections to the title of this my address.
Perhaps, except during the civil war, Nigerians have not seen it this bad since Independence. There is nobody that is enjoying the Nigeria of today, however highly placed. Even if your resource base, which I doubt, is not shaken, could you travel from one place to another with peace of mind? When Father came to my office, part of my discussion hinged on the security situation around your school. In spite the biting economy, Nigerians are forced to now travel by air to places they would have travelled to by road. Just recently, air lines increased their fares such that return ticket to Lagos now is nothing less than N150,000. This increase is explained as caused by the scarcity of aviation fuel and the exchange rate. Most banks in Nigeria have reduced their work hours because of the cost of diesel. What is very painful is the near absence of alternatives. Can somebody decide to use kerosene because gas is costly? No because the alternative – Kerosene – is equally costly. Father cannot sustain the running of this school on school fees students paid a few months ago!
The summary of the condition of Nigeria is that the country has collapsed. Yesterday was Independence Day Celebration and it was painful seeing many Nigerians saying there was nothing to celebrate. They are right; it is only a fool that will celebrate failure. In the midst of these, what do we do? I suspect it was in the light of this that the “voting wisely” was added to my speech.
We have not voted wisely in the past, otherwise, President Buhari did not have any reason to return after the disastrous first tenure. Now we have the opportunity of voting again. What do we do with the opportunity? Part of what sustained the failure of the past was our nonchalant attitude to voting, where many did not even have voters’ cards. With the upsurge in the number of those that participated in the last registration, one will reasonably suspect that things are getting better.
As we near the end , let me ask the final question, who do we vote for? Is it morally right that a nation of over 100 million vibrant and healthy people should seek to be governed by a sick person? This is not mocking the sick, but facing the reality. Would you be comfortable voting for our ancestors that should be contended offering advice to the younger ones? How “happy” would you be to vote in those whose educational background and other things associated with them are always crooked? Have you taken time to study the antecedents of those seeking to govern us and know from their past the prospects of their future? While I leave you with these questions, let me say that as for me, I have opted, in the spirit of voting wisely, not just to vote for Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party, but to participate actively in his campaign. This is a duty I owe myself and posterity. Any further mistake will ruin us beyond redemption!
How do I conclude? What would be my last charge to the graduands? Remember to your last day this school, and these teachers who laboured so patiently to turn the savages handed over to them into civilized gentlemen. When it is time for you to give back to the society, may this noble institution be among the first in the roaster of beneficiaries.
Thank you for your attention.
