Most Rev Prof Godfrey Onah (Catholic Bishop of Nsukka)
By: Most Rev Prof Godfrey Onah (Catholic Bishop of Nsukka)
Akwukwo
na-aso uso;
m ‘0 na-a fia aru na mmuta.
Onye welu ntasi-obi,
oga-amuta akwukwo;
m ‘obulu na nne ya na nna ya nwee ego!
Yet, the question remains: Is education, especially higher education,
still worth the trouble for our people? If material wealth was all we needed in
life, then higher education would not be the shortest and best route to it.
But, as Aristotle rightly observed, people do not usually seek wealth for its
own sake, but rather for other things which they hope that wealth would make
possible, namely, “better life” — to use a popular Nigerian expression.
Commenting on Aristotle’s view, Amartya Sen said: “The usefulness of wealth
lies in the things it allows us to do — the substantive freedoms it helps us to
achieve. As has already been mentioned, Sen sees development as the means of
removing the different types of unfreedom which bedevil human beings, thus
offering them more freedom, The Legend of Nsukka, nay Enugu State, the Late
Bishop Michael Ugwu Eneja, once said to me: “The greatest freedom you can give
to a man is to educate him.” I agree. To educate is to lead to the truth and,
as Jesus said, “you will learn the truth and the truth will make you free”
(John 8: 32). Of all forms of bondage or slavery, ignorance is the worst. For
it totally deprives a person of the possibility of choice. Freedom is the
capacity for choice. A piece of drama which was very popular when I was in
primary school was titled: “Ignorance is a disease.” Putting these together,
one may conclude that education, being a way to freedom, is both a type of
development and a means of further development. Education brings out the best
in a person. It polishes one’s talents and increases one’s potentials.
Education enhances personal development. It also equips the individual to make
a more personal and meaningful contribution to the society.
Many young lgbo people today, especially the males, shun University
education, because they believe that taking the fastest route to most wealth
will automatically translate into more development or “better life.” They are
wrong. Wealth without knowledge increases bondage. And development is about
freedom. However, if Igbo male youths today show less interest in the
cultivation of the mind, elder lgbo intellectuals should ask themselves what
they might have done to contribute to this. Could it be that the intellectuals
themselves have failed to show by their life that their vocation is worth
following by others? The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, one of
Christianity’s greatest enemies, told his Christian contemporaries: “If your
faith makes you happy, show yourselves to be happy. Your faces have always done
more harm to your faith than our reasons! If that glad message of your Bible
were written on your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the
authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion. Elsewhere he said that for
him to believe in the redeemer, “his disciples would have to look more
redeemed!. ‘Intellectuals who are not proud of their identity or who have
nothing to show for their intellectual labour are bad publicity for
intellectualism. An intellectual, who succumbs to the prevalent commercial
civilization in lgboland, cannot be a role model to the myriad of Igbo boys
hawking wares along the streets of all major cities in Nigeria, nor can he
rouse the envy of the trader in the Ariaria market, Aba or Otu Onitsha. In
Nigeria today, politics has become the most lucrative business. The inordinate
amount of money people collect (to say “earn” would be to abuse the term), just
for being anywhere near political power in this country, is visible even to the
blind in Nigeria today. People are usually not very parsimonious with money
they did not suffer to get. Should intellectuals, instead of getting angry at
the banditry and spendthrift culture of some corrupt politicians and political
office holders, prostrate before them, in order to eat the crumbs that fall
from the masters tables, then some boys who have some dignity in them would
prefer to run after molue buses with sachets of “pure water.” If those who
should know adopt the principle “ewu soko ye ji ekwukwd’ (the goat follows
whoever is carrying green grass), they should blame nobody but themselves if
they are scorned.
Although most of our intellectuals have remained faithful to their
intellectual vocation, not without difficulties and temptations, the harvest is
still plenty, the labourers are very few indeed, the instruments still fewer
and those few ones are often very defective. One does not need to look far in
order to see areas crying to our intellectuals for immediate and constant
intervention. Unfortunately, because of our colonial history from which we
inherited our present formal educational system, our intellectual education is
often not relevant to the cultural, environmental and existential needs of the
people and place whose development we would want to advance. Every knowledge,
says Hans George Gadamer, is an answer to a question. The fundamental question
which our intellectuals should constantly ask themselves is:
Whose questions are we answering? Applying this to our various areas of
specialization, one may ask: Whose philosophy are our professors of philosophy
“professing”? Economics is all about the management of the home. Whose home are
our economists managing? Medicine is for health. Which parameters are used in
the measurement of health and sickness? Human nature is one, it is true, and
the exchange of words, ideas, inventions, systems, is part of the human mode of
being. As I have said elsewhere: “Whatever one man in any corner of the globe
has thought out and expressed publicly should be regarded as a common patrimony
of the entire human race and each group of people should feel free to
appropriate and apply such thoughts [and their public expressions] to their
particular circumstances, if it suits them to do so.” Nevertheless, the
variables of place and time make so much difference in actual human life that
the appropriation and application of ideas and things from other persons and
places cannot be done without proper evaluation of their suitability. A people
cannot really develop on borrowed models any more than a bird can fly with
borrowed wings. Ekwa nñta a-n ‘g’esh ‘Ike n ‘ukwu (borrowed clothes do not
fit).
It is one thing for us to borrow general principles already elaborated
by others and elsewhere. It is another for us to be mere consumers of finished
Western products, worse still, of their poor Chinese imitations. We cannot
meaningfully talk of development unless we make serious attempts to improve on
what we already have and educate our people on the principles behind the things
we borrow. A few examples may help illustrate the point being made here.
One would have expected our agric engineers to ask some questions about
how to improve on the very dangerous and inefficient rope (agba /ete) that has
been used to climb palm trees in our area for centuries. The palm tree has been
a major economic tree in our area. Maybe we are waiting for the Europeans who
do not have palm trees, or for the Malaysians who borrowed palm seedlings from
us some decades ago, to ask and answer this urgent question for us. In the
meantime, we continue to lose precious lives of the climbers, whose rudimentary
methods of maintenance of the ropes are not enough to guarantee their safety,
especially during the harsh harmattan season.
To be contd
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