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Tuesday, 27 September 2016

The Task Ahead For Igbo Intellectuals (2)


                  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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