Now that we have a graduate as president And finally we have a University graduate for a president in Nigeria. That is President Musa Yar’adua. Ironically, he came from the northern section of the country that has always been considered educationally backward. Things are getting better. What is not an irony however, is the fact that Musa Yar’adua is from Katsina State and Katsinawa have been known for their love for intellectualism. Even long before the colonial masters came, they were lovers of
education as it was known then. Congratualations, Katsinawa for giving us our first University graduate to occupy Aso Rock. This feat is an icing on the cake for the people of Katsina; it is a wonderful feather to your cap for centuries of dedication to learning. And it is more so when it is recalled that Katsina hosted the first higher institution in the North – the Katsina Teacher Training College now Barewa College. Incidentally, the wife of our new president, Turai Yar’adua, is a University graduate too. Things are getting much better. But were things bad before? Yes, they were. Why? We have had men in Aso Rock who could hardly see beyond their noses. They were presidents who, while the likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is busy be waxing cerebral discussing global economy, the dynamics of debt management or cancellation or how we can make the best of institutions such as the World Bank, would be busy analyzing the same global as well as national issues with native intelligence and covering up their
lack of depth with native proverbs. And it is not only that. Many were those who had sat in as our presidents who hardly knew what to do with the position. Planning ahead for the
future was not a matter they had full grasp of and neither could they understand. No wonder, one secondary school leaver, once our Commander-In-Chief in the 1970s when oil dollar was plenty on this shores, was reported to have said that money was not this nation’s problem but how to spend it. In the end, his likes found a way to spend the money - they spent it hosting idols and masquerades for which an altar was also built in the name of a National Theatre during FESTAC ’77. Much more than that, and in a show of lack of intellectual understanding, was the ridiculous extent to which a former military president went to show his lack of respect and appreciation for the need to take care of the nation’s future generation being groomed in our Universities. His was total lack of sense of what good education means to a nation. This man bastardized the nation’s University system. He turned the Universities to his personal room to which only he had keys and which he could lock up and open as he chose. Only a man who had little or no understanding of the importance of the products or our Universities to the future of this
nation could ever have done that. The mud into which he dragged University education in this country could only be the thought of a mind that had not been refined and polished within the premises of those ivory towers.
More reviews about the Daily Trust