By Ebisike Ebube George
Corruptocracy as system of leadership or government although not a conventional term is occasioned by the practise and covert actions of leaders and stakeholders laying calculated and sustained seiges on information, logic, imagination and morality, such that sociopolitical stability which fosters growth is not attainable because the population is ignorant.
Leadership and followership is a valuable reinforcing system just like the order of astronomical/heavenly bodies which exert forces (of gravity) on each other. A system that kills education has already murdered healthcare and several other bordering/intersecting economic pillars. In understanding a society’s enduring cultures, advancements and sustanances, it would be important to study its educational systems and the driving forces of its knowledge wheel. From that standpoint the human element and people who make up that society interact with environment and globalisation in today’s world, first do so through integral prescience or the sanity of educable faculties.
An educated population is a wealth one. Every nation’s leadership must strive to impactfully fund the tutelage system and ensure the preservation of the collective sense of mind of its citizenry. Leadership dispensed contrary to the above system for its citizenry is one that is poised for decline and one which practices feudalism, thereby killing education and limitless productivity. In the digitally automated world of today post Covid19, a nation which is divesting in education of its population and any mechanism of information multiplication for national empowerment is building an anarchist state of nationhood.
Suffering a knowledge pandemic which Africa has been unfortunately guilty of, particularly Nigeria is one of the reasons it remains ill equipped most time to deal with a biological force majeure such as the emergence of Covid19 (a trade and covert War pathogen). Except we interrogate the realities of a reordered world as a country which once was and evolve a culture of extreme learning, science and technology, new pathogens and diseases a will certainly challenge what is left of Nigeria in the future. If we do not learn from history and books we I’ll repeat it.
When a nation is unprepared to produce and effectively training and give a sense of value to healthcare workers, or enable infrastructural management of its medical ecosystem and police its health system using the right policies, innovation and citizen commitment and best practises economic challenges become the norm, afterall a “healthy nation is a wealth nation”.
To bring all the above into perspective, the picture of playing Russian Roulette with your successor generations by virtue of undermining the quality of education or healthcare of the citizenry at the budgetry level is a death knell or blow to societal advancement, economic productivity national intelligentsia, some measure of self-sufficiency, sustainability and future competitiveness. Nigeria today has over ninety million poverty trapped assets, about the population of Japan, the third largest economy in the world.
Assets who through education can be unleashed for national gain. When a national fails it’s education and healthcare system it has rigged it’s nation security apparatchiks in the now and future.
When education and healthcare are in threat, such a situation is a direct danger to food sufficiency, future jobs and all forms of decent work going by the SDG goals and pursuit. In such a circumstance every nation has a national security attack on its hands either self inflected by reckless decision making at the leadership level or callous inaction by the followership, or even by the lack of visionary attentiveness of the educable mind to signs that a covert orchestration by a foreign economic power or hitman is in operation. Underfunding education and healthcare in Nigeria by the GMB Government is an aberration to the balance of nature and future economic emancipation of Nigeria and Africa from near untameable colonial stringtures.
The Federal government’s approval of N27bn for National Assembly renovation by cutting down on education and health budgets is totally unacceptable and an original sin. It only reinforced the out of school decadence we are seemingly doomed to. Without education there can be no fertile minds to equip for innovation, problem solving, research and development and eventual national competitiveness. It will foster religious slavery, depression and fatalism amongst the youth who make up more than 65% of the Nigerian population.
By 2050 when there is a population explosion in Nigeria, an uneducated majority is a recipy for more poverty, hunger, radicalisation, ethnic aggression and consequent failed statehood. Cutting down on education and healthcare means more sick people, lowered life expectancy, BigPharma drug dependency in the West, substance abuse, rape which is currently having higher incidences and social banditry. The fact that Nigeria cannot adhere to the 26% of budgetry allocation for education of its citizens as required by UNESCO, a body is a party to, is clear sabotage of the knowledge protocol expected to be put in place to surge Nigeria forward to Africa’s Super Power status.
Conclusively, the #BlackLivesMatter is actually an #AllLivesMatter clarion call to re-orientate, re-evaluate and re-educate the society that the holistic mental substance of America’s racist trappings is revoltingly unacceptable in today’s world. George Floyd’s “I can’t breath” plea to his killers which went unheeded underscored racism as mental healthcare debacle and pandemic across its society and the world as a whole. Justice, equity and fairness are enthroned globally and in any progressive society sustainably, once education and mental/bodily well-being become a fundamental responsibility of the governance structure and culture of peaceful co-existence.