In 2015, I told Buhari I’d be his watchdog, not his lapdog
In last week’s column titled “Psychoanalyzing Dishonest, Low-IQ Buhari Apologists,” I quoted a sentence from my April 4, 2015 column titled “After the Euphoria, What President-elect Buhari Needs to Know” to show that I put the president on notice from the get-go that, although I supported him, I would be a critical watchdog, not a fawning lapdog.
Apparently, many people missed the column when it was first published. In response to requests from readers, I’ve decided to republish it this week, almost two years later. It is unedited, as its print version can testify. Read and decide for yourself if what I wrote could ever come from someone who wanted a job from Buhari or who “hates” him. Enjoy:
March 30 was my birthday. Although I don’t celebrate birthdays, people close to me-especially my children and my wife-make it a special day for me. They take me to a dainty restaurant for a nice dinner. But this birthday was different. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep, either. Although I knew that the balance of forces favored a Buhari win, I was nonetheless gripped by crippling
It is common knowledge that the tone of discipline in schools today has greatly fallen short of what it used to be when even the cracking of voice by a teacher conveyed messages to students. In the 1960s and 1970s, students understood what it meant when a teacher changed his sitting position and could read meanings into the way he walked or even from the look on his face. While it may be difficult to regain that lost glory, it is important that the minimum acceptable standard of discipline is maintained in schools.
Two recent events though regrettable prompted today’s discourse on this page. The first is the case involving a corps member serving in Zamfara state and a female secondary school student. According to media reports, the corps member Michael Uwakwe entered the classroom and announced to students that he was going to give a test. When he directed them to put away their books, a female student was resentful. While the test was on, she hissed and hissed again. This compelled the corps member to ask why she was exhibiting such a rude behavior. When he got to her seat, he discovered that the student had scribbled “nonsense” on her sheet of paper. anxieties about the election. I’d feared that Goodluck Jonathan would rig himself back to power and plunge the country into a fratricidal upheaval.
Even though I live in America and will not be affected in a direct way by what happens in Nigeria, I love Nigeria too much to be unconcerned by what goes on there. I knew that Nigeria would never be able to survive another four years of Goodluck Jonathan’s ineptitude, and the prospect of Jonathan forcing himself back to power by any means terrified me to no end. That was why I stayed up all night monitoring the election on Facebook, Twitter, and Channels TV. My heart stood still several times during the night. Thankfully, my worst fears didn’t come to pass.
I was also deeply touched when I discovered that my American students who are enrolled in my Global Journalism class this semester got equally emotionally invested in the election. At least two of them stayed up the night monitoring the results of the election on Channel TV’s livestream. You’re probably wondering why young white Americans would be so invested in
The teacher, a corps member, felt infuriated and asked the female student to kneel down. When the corps member later returned, the student was nowhere to be found. She had gone home to report the corps member to her father who felt the best way to dare the teacher and the school was to “hire” the police to deal with the corps member. The father of the female student came to the school with police who told the school principal they were there to arrest the corps member. The corps member accepted to go to the station with the police on condition that the principal would accompany him. At the police station, “Mr. Uwakwe was slapped and detained for six hours”, said Mrs. Victoria Okakwu, the NYSC Director (Corps Welfare and Inspectorate).
Although NYSC authorities have redeployed Michael Uwakwe from Zamfara to Anambra state just as the police commissioner in Zamfara state has tendered apology for the way his personnel handled the matter, the separate reactions of the student, her father and the police are issues that threaten the enforcement of discipline by the school as an institutional authority. These will be put in proper perspectives in the next few paragraphs.
The second mind-bending an election taking place in a distant place to sacrifice their sleep.
Well, in several discussions in the class, I sparked their interest about Nigeria-and about the elections that just ended. But, most importantly, Goodluck Jonathan has become a known name in America in the last few months for the wrong reasons. The worldwide “Bring Back Our Girls” protest caused several Americans to find out who Nigeria’s president was. What they found out-and say about him-isn’t flattering. First, they think he’s too incompetent to be president of any country. Second, Americans find his name and everpresent fedora hilarious. (There is a popular comedic children’s TV show here called “Good Luck Charlie,” so when President Jonathan’s name is mentioned in the news, they think of the TV show, which causes them to laugh).
In any event, as I wrote on my Facebook timeline, Buhari’s epochmaking electoral triumph in the last presidential election is the best birthday gift I’ve ever received in all my adult life. I’ve been ecstatic since it became apparent that Buhari had won the election. This is undoubtedly a great moment incident involved some senior secondary (SS) students of Sa’adu Zungur Model School in Bauchi. They were said to have allegedly contracted “mock marriage” among themselves. It was alleged that a male student, who claimed to be the groom, paid N500 as dowry to “marry” a female student while their classmates contributed money for snacks needed at the ceremony. The school which was closed down after this unfortunate incident has since been re-opened on the orders of the Bauchi State Deputy Governor who is also the State Commissioner for Education.
The action taken by the Bauchi state government after receiving the report of an investigation committee set up to probe the incident is highly commendable. At least, it would deter potential offenders in the same school and elsewhere. Certain misdemeanours persist in the society because lawbreakers were never sanctioned in the past. Equally laudable is the speed with which the investigations were concluded and recommendations executed. Details of the disciplinary measures taken by the Bauchi State Government include the removal of the principal and the two vice principals of the affected school. Seven of the eight students who were prime actors in the “mock for Nigeria and for Nigeria’s democracy. But after savoring the afterglow of the victory, Presidentelect Buhari needs to come to terms with several things.
First, as he himself has recognized in his acceptance speech, his honeymoon with Nigerians won’t last too long. In light of the blight and venality that has characterized the past few years-and the enormous, some would say unrealistic, hopes that Nigerians have invested in him to right the wrongs of the past-there is bound to be what sociologists call the crisis of rising expectations. So when Nigerians get impatient with him, he shouldn’t be irritated.
His relationship with the media would be crucial. The media will get under his skin. Columnists like me will excoriate him, not because we hate him, but because we care, and because we know that to perform well and be in touch with the masses of people who elected him, we need to help hold his feet to the fire. When Thomas Jefferson famously said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” he was acknowledging the importance of the media to the sustenance of democracy.
President Buhari should expect to be scrutinized and criticized and even “attacked” by critical media outfits like the compulsively contrarian Sahara Reporters, which robustly supported him throughout his campaign for the presidency. Recall that the same Sahara Reporters vigorously marriage” have been expelled from the school. The eighth student is the one who reportedly resisted the proposal.
The two cases speak of the general laxity among today’s secondary school students in Nigeria. Government, school administrators and the home (parents) all share in the blame for the high moral decadence among school boys and girls. But more influential than any other factor in the destruction of our values is modern ICT. The internet is one technology that has since its advent rendered young boys and girls vulnerable to cultures that seek to destroy the fabrics of traditional African society. The mobile telephone is a powerful socialization tool that ubiquitously penetrates the foundations of moral training separately provided at home, in the school, the mosque and church.
The introduction, by government, of day secondary schools in the early 1980s is another factor that persuasively limited the influence of schools in controlling and monitoring students. The nonprofessionalization of teaching which permits un-trained and unqualified persons to be a teacher is another critical challenge to the system. If the corps member in Zamfara were a trained and qualified teacher, he would have managed the classroom situation in a professional way that could have forestalled parental irresponsibility and police action. A situation where graduates of B.Sc. and B.A degrees are posted to teach in secondary schools with little or no knowledge supported Jonathan against the late Yar’adua’s “cabal.” Before then, it supported Abubakar Atiku against Obasanjo. It will turn against Buhari the moment he officially assumes duties. It’s not personal. Sahara Reporters understands its role as a comforter of the afflicted and an afflicter of the comfortable.
Many of us share this “adversarial” philosophy of the press and shouldn’t be made to suffer for it. I want to be able to visit Nigeria without being harassed by security forces because I wrote critical articles against the president and his government. That’s one area I give President Goodluck Jonathan some credit. I was the first person to call him “unfathomably clueless” in my recounting of his first American visit when he was acting president. “Clueless” has now become his second name. Yet I have never been harassed in all the times I have visited Nigeria during his presidency.
Where he erred, however, was in choosing vulgar, abusive, ill-bred philistines like Reuben Abati and Doyin Okupe as his mediators with the Nigerian public. Buhari should never make that mistake. He should make it clear to whoever he appoints as his intercessors with the public that their role is to explain the president’s policies to the people, not to insult and denigrate critics of government. Employing Abati- and Okupe-like media reps is the fastest way to deplete any president’s goodwill.
Lastly, Buhari should resist the temptation of falling into the trap of provincialism. He won an unprecedentedly national mandate. His “kitchen cabinet” should reflect this. of the techniques of classroom management including motivation, reward and punishment is bound to produce the kind of embarrassment that ensued between the corps member and a female student in Zamfara state.
The home, which is the first school in the life of a child, is perhaps guiltier than government. Contemporary parents take pleasure in over-pampering their children as if the love for the later begins and ends with everything money can provide. Parents who think they are expressing love by disgracing teachers in the presence of their children should know that they could one day become victims of misconducts in the hands of such scoundrel children.
It is painful to lament the manner in which some school administrators and teachers have turned themselves into “Nanis” for the sake of peanuts they “enjoy” from parents or students. It is only when principals and teachers remain assertive and contented with their job that students and their parents will appreciate the worth of teachers as character moulders.
Unlike the Bauchi case, the Zamfara incident wasn’t resolved in a way that would send warning signals to students who are thinking of daring their teachers especially corps members. The unruly female student should be punished not just as deterrent to other students but as way of asserting the authority of teachers and the school. May Allah (SWT) guide the Zamfara state ministry of education to decide wisely, amin.