As a country, Nigeria is going through interesting times on so many levels. A rendition of true stories about what happens in so many parts of the country to so many people all at once tell the leave no one in doubt that the country is in a unique season.
On the national level, there has been the gradual but grating decline in the quality of leadership the country is receiving at the moment. More than half a dozen years of broken promises by those in government have left the Giant of Africa directionless and rudderless. The result is a country on the brink of shocking disintegration.
On individual levels, a stiff draught of decadence is surging. It is cutting through individuals, through families and through communities to batter the society. Day after day, it is with shock that those who have managed to retain their ability to be shocked receive incredible stories of the things people engage in, especially some of them very young. A fashionable but very futile justification is that everything now goes in Nigeria. But the discerning know that at the root of the decadence ripping up Nigeria is a savagely compromised value system.
A languishing value chain
The decline and demise of societies often takes off from the mark where anything begins to go and everything suddenly acquires a price tag. When hitherto non-negotiables suddenly acquire a price tag, sacred spaces morph into market places. Inevitably, what happens is that in a bit to outdo the competition and rake in nice profits, all becomes fair in war.
Generations have come and gone in Nigeria. Generations will continue to come and go. Change has been blowing into Nigeria from all over the world and a burning frustration is that the country has been ever so slow to adapt. Yet, when many of those who no longer have age on their side and are consequently at death`s door consider today`s young, it is ever with the feeling of nostalgia, a yearning for the good old days. There is always some regret too, at what the today`s young have become, and the fact that they have shunted every value that gave life meaning in the good old days out of the window.
Whether enough responsibility is being taken by those responsible for this slow but deleterious decline remains to be seen.
Bauchi`s curious solution
Now, there is something endlessly curious and even controversial about the current Bauchi State Commissioner of Education Mr. Aliyu Tilde. Memory is unfailing that at the height of heated debates over the May 12, 2022 killing of Miss Deborah Samuel, the 22-year-old student of Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto over blasphemy, Mr. Tilde, said to be one of northern Nigeria`s more famous intellectuals, let rip with a searing tweet in which he blamed the deceased for bringing such a fiery death upon herself. His incendiary comments drew no consequences. It was unsurprisingly that shortly after his comments, a young lady in Bauchi State was almost lynched to death for blasphemy.
Recently, Mr. Tilde revealed that the Bauchi State Government was considering a kind of segregation in secondary schools that would see female students kept apart from male students to curb immorality.
In Mr. Tilde`s wisdom, the solution to the immorality eating up Bauchi State is to separate the male students from the female students in schools. If and when such an action is taken, there can be no doubt about what side of the divide will suffer most from a decision that would be ill-advised to put it mildly.
In many ways, equality begins from the mind. The mind has always proven itself to be a fertile receptor of subtle messages and cues. There is no doubt that if the Bauchi State government ever goes forward with this egregious proposal, it will send the wrong message and scale back the many heroic efforts that have been put in the state and in Nigeria as a whole to achieve gender parity. In a country where religion and superstition always get in the way of gender justice, this will be a brutal blow.
The Bauchi State Government will be better served channeling its considerable energies and resources into transforming education in the state. Besides, that girls share the same learning space with boys is not the reason the state continues to lag behind in the development of education.
One of Nigeria`s most lamentable curses is the sheer number of square pegs forced to fit into round holes in public offices. Indeed, they abound.
Kene Obiezu,
Twitter: @kenobiezu
