“Unfortunately, I failed to achieve all these expectations. For seven years, I was unable to tackle the issue of out-of-school children and several other challenges in the education sector.”
With these two sentences, Education Minister Adamu Adamu made history of some sort last Thursday during the 66th National Council on Education (NCE) in Abuja.
In a country where public officials – especially political appointees and elected ones – would typically rather pull out their teeth without anaesthetic than admit to their own glaring and obvious failure, this was somewhat unprecedented.
Even more unprecedented was that he was pronouncing this judgment on himself while still in office, unlike the plethora of public officials who only turn into retrospective Aristotles after leaving office.
History notwithstanding, if one scratches below the surface to take a look at the context surrounding that statement, it quickly becomes clear that it was as empty and unconvincing as it was disingenuous and ill-intentioned.
For emphasis, there is in fact no such thing as “western” education in Nigeria’s context because Nigeria is not a country that is set up to face “western” or “eastern” economic and cultural power blocs
Far from being a “honest Mallam” delivering a brutally honest self assessment about his tenure, this was the crowning move of the classical Buhari appointee – craven, dishonest, unapologetic and intended to mislead. For starters:
“I failed – because they made me do it”
If one reads the lines shortly before and just after Minister Adamu’s historic admission, it stops looking like an admission of failure altogether, and starts to resemble buck-shifting.
That’s because it is exactly that. Take a look: “Most of our policies at the federal level pulled children out of the street back to the school, but evidently, the actions of the states’ governments are pushing the children back to the streets… […] However, there are so many factors that contributed to that failure, but the key one, probably, has to do with education commissioners in the states.”
In Adamu’s words, his failure was not in fact his and his alone, but actually that of education commissioners across Nigeria’s 36 states.
Never mind that Abuja exerts a level of control over education across Nigeria that makes it intellectually untenable to claim that anyone but the Federal Minister should be held responsible – Adamu in his mind, was a victim of the incompetence or sabotage of those working under his supervision.
Ergo, it was not his fault. Also tellingly, his failure “admittance” made no mention of the fact that his tenure saw the longest cumulative period of ASUU strikes since Abacha.
His sole metric for measuring failure was basic education – which could conveniently be blamed on the states instead of Abuja.
When one takes a step back to look at Adamu’s comments in context, it becomes clear that he was neither admitting failure nor pronouncing a verdict on his tenure.
He was merely reprising the famous Buhari method of invoking a scapegoat, telling convenient mistruths and completely omitting important information and context that would directly threaten his preferred narrative.
In any case, even without examining his words carefully, one could easily tell that they were empty, mealy-mouthed and insincere because the words “I hereby resign my position” did not immediately follow them.
Education minister vs “Westernisation”
Even more egregiously, what he said next revealed a lot about the mindset that has animated and directed Nigeria’s education strategy for the past seven years: “… one highly placed government official called my attention to certain materials on sex education being used in schools, and I almost collapsed because I never expected that.
I am one of those persons who believe that sex education should not be taught in our schools. […] From all indications, the increasing advocacy for sex education in schools is targeted at undermining and destroying the moral and religious fibre of our society.
Regrettably, it’s being promoted through social media and other forms of westernisation.”
I challenge the reader to read that quote again and then point out where the reasoning and mindset behind this differs significantly from that of Boko Haram and its many affiliate organisations on the topic of “western” education.
For emphasis, there is in fact no such thing as “western” education in Nigeria’s context because Nigeria is not a country that is set up to face “western” or “eastern” economic and cultural power blocs. There is simply “education” in our context – the thing needed to make Nigeria’s 180 million+ population economically productive and 21st Century-ready.
If the Minister of Education in Abuja does not understand this, but sees the world through the binary of “western” education and “eastern” education (which presumably can be approximated to Islamic religious instruction), then it does not take a seer to understand why the longest cumulative period of ASUU strikes since the return of democracy has not been a matter of any significant priority under the Buhari government.
If Nigeria’s Minister of Education could mount a stage to proudly declare, “I failed, but it was someone else’s fault,” followed by a declaration that could be boiled down to “part of western education is hereby forbidden,” then Abubakar Shekau’s conceptual descendants need not hoist their AK-47s any longer.
With Federal Cabinet ministers like these, who needs Boko Haram?
