Continued from yesterday
A NATION needs values, memories and history. It needs her citizens to be able to connect past to present and reevaluate the future.Nigeria has struggled with decades of military regimes that contributed in no small measures to her disjointed historical, constitutional and political trajectories and dynamics. Now that a democratic experiment has been underway, it is high time we saw the place of values and ideology in Nigeria’s political destiny.
The goal of national integration in Nigeria is to ensure that Nigerians at best forget their ethnic affiliation and at worst downgrade it into a secondary position behind a civic awareness of their identification with the Nigerian state and her national imperatives. As it is, national integration is not moving along because Nigerians have not learnt to live together. We are still struggling with the import and consequences of putting our religious, cultural and ethnic identities above what it means for us to be truly and genuinely Nigerians.
This is why it is difficult for us to arrive at an electioneering campaign moment without generating serious hullabaloo around Christian-Christian, Christian-Muslim and Muslim-Muslim tickets. And this is also why Nigeria has a solid youth bulge that cannot be mined and harnessed for its generational and diversity capital because a significant portion of the youth population has no sense of what history signifies for them and for Nigeria.
Democracy needs education. A flourishing democratic ethos requires a significantly vibrant curricula on civic education and history. Civic awareness and civic engagementthat keep feeding knowledge about government, its functions and its responsibilities to its citizens.Indeed, it is such a civic awareness that makes democracy and democratic sophistication possible in the first instance.
It is civic engagement that serves as the vibrant path towards preserving the democratic spirit. We can say, without any need to hypothesize, that Nigeria’s democracy will not grow and succeed if civic education is not strengthened in Nigeria’s school system. In other words, if the Nigerian citizenry is not informed and civically aware, then it does not have the capacity to guard democracy. And it leaves the political space open for all forms of demagoguery and selfish political mobilisation that continue to undermine political stability in a country where tension has become a normal thing.
Civic education is inextricably linked with history. We cannot even begin to understand what type of democracy we need to grow into, and what we need to do with our democratic aspiration, if we do not have a sense of history.We cannot make any significant move towards nationhood if we lack a coherent sense of where we are coming from and where we need to be. We cannot put Nigeria’s political history into a democratic container if, to quote Chinua Achebe, we continue to obscure “where the rain began to beat us.” History is Nigeria’s window into those events, actions, errors and mistakes that nudged us into the wrong national path and determined our current national struggles for reckoning. We remember the axiom that those who neglect history are bound to keep repeating its errors and mistakes.
Civic education and history connect immediately with urgency of learning to live together; of curating educational curricula that have the objectives of national integration and democratic awareness at the core. Nigeria’s public sphere is the most enlightening and disturbing barometer for measuring the civic possibility.
A browsing of the comment section of any newspaper, and on any national issue, will demonstrate that Nigerians are far from being united. It will also sadly reveal the level of ignorance about the basics of national history. Thus, while consecutive Nigerian governments have been concerned with the need to integrate science and technology education—or STEM—into the Nigerian school curricula, Nigeria’s civic potential keeps diminishing! The pupils and students are acing mathematics and basic science and technology, and yet we keep killing one another! This tells us the critical fact that STEM education can only yield a very narrow understanding of what it means to redirect technological progress along the path of humane development. It does not speak to the crucial necessity of learning to be compassionate, empathetic and humane within a national context of difference.
Nigeria needs students—and a broad human capital development trajectory—that possess the unique and significant twenty-first century skills: the capacity for communication, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. They also need to be able to maneuver these skills within a space—communal, national, workplace—of diversity and difference.
To be a genius in science and technology, or to be an Albert Einstein in Nigeria, without these skills and humane capacities is simply to be an educated robot. But more significantly, and within a postcolonial space like Nigeria, it is simply to be a dangerous and narrow-minded bigot who is pushed to divert his or her knowledge into prejudicial means that endanger others.
History and civic education matter for Nigeria. And our political will should be channeled towards making them matter even more in our policy architecture beyond just injecting these subjects into the curricula.
Concluded.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa is Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration, Abuja.
