There is a story of the stubborn housefly. This house fly has refused to listen to the warnings of the undertakers and mourners. The mourners and the undertakers didn’t want the fly to perish; they wanted it to stay alive and not be buried with the rotten, smelling corpse. But the fly would rather go the grave with the corpse where it thought it could continue to enjoy the smell of the decayed corpse. Little did the fly know that there is no work in the grave where he is going to. There is also the story of Eze Onyeagwalam; the All-knowing King. He knows everything and does not need anyone’s suggestions or advice. You risk his anger when you venture into making a correction to him; and before you open your mouth, he knows what you want to say. He will not let you say it because he will help you say it. And by so doing he shuts you up! But because he would take no one’s advice or correction, one day he woke up and wanted to go to the market for some shopping. He picked his best regalia and dressed and walked majestically to the market. And while he was passing in his royalty, his subjects saw that instead of fine smelling ointment, excreta was oozing from the king’s wrapper and covered him all over. He had worn, unknown to him, a wrapper that was covered with feces. He did not see it. The people saw it as he passed on his way. But instead of pointing out this anomaly to the great All-knowing King his subjects ignored what they saw and instead did obeisance to him for fear of the power of his majesty, the power of the throne, the power to banish and imprison, the power to torture, etc. As the King acknowledges greetings from his subject, he gets to the market eventually, and by the time he gets to the market, the market is already at the peak of business. Then the king goes into the market with his excreta-smelling regalia, and everybody that gets close to him runs away to the shock of the king. He does not know why they are running away. He thinks the first few people running away from him are probably insane. So he continues to move on, in his royalty. As he goes close to the people, the people run away; including those he wants to patronize. It continues like this until the people stop running away and begin to cluster around him, to behold the king who came to the market with feces covered regalia; to amuse themselves with the king who has so much ridiculed his community and throne; to see for themselves the epoch making king who rejected all wise counsel and went on solo trip. Buying and selling stops as everybody closes his shop to watch the king that has messed up royalty, the king that has killed himself. Still the king does not know what is going on; he probably thought the people gathered to pay him respects and he is waving his hand to the people that have become ashamed of his foolishness and his ridiculing of his throne. The king continues in his ignorance until one mad man came from the crowd and approached the king. He has a message for the king. He has placed the king on a scale and found him wanting. And since the King did not listen to sane people, would he listen to the mad man? “You are smelling, Eze Onyeagawalam!”, announced the mad man. While the mad man attempts to utter another “forbidden” word to the Eze, his people rush and drag him by the side and took him away. But while this is going on, a boy of five years goes to the king and says: “Onye Eze, this people say you are smelling!”. Hearing the small child address the Eze with such damnation, the crowd burst into laughter and they all chorused “Onye Eze, you are smelling.” As the song rents the air, the king comes to his senses and realizes he had messed up himself. He realizes that he made a mockery of himself and the throne. But any redemption for the king? He has brought ridicule to the throne. There is also the story of Abiku, and according to JP Clark, the Abiku is known for his “coming and going this very season” while Prof Wole Soyinke quotes Abiku as saying “I am Abiku, calling for the first/And repeated time”. The Yoruba believe Abiku to be the “wanderer child. It is the same child who dies and returns again and again to plague the mother.” He delights in tormenting the mother and thus he would die and reincarnate to be born of the same mother and he would continue the cycle of incarnation until something is done to stop it. And this is what Soyinka says can be done: So when the snail is burnt in his shell,/Whet the heated fragment, brand me/ Deeply on the breast - you must know him/When Abiku calls again.” And when this is done, Soyinka continues: “I am the squirrel teeth, cracked/The riddle of the palm; remember/This, and dig me deeper still into/ The god's swollen foot.” The wailing of the mother does not touch the spirit of Abiku; in fact he finds fun with it and would return to be born and to die again. All the curses, all the libations do not move the spirit of the Abiku to show mercy to the wailing weary mother, and Soyinka puts it succinctly: “Once and the repeated time, ageless/Though I puke, and when you pour/Libations, each finger points me near/The way I came, where/… Night, and Abiku sucks the oil/From lamps. Mothers! I'll be the Suppliant snake coiled on the doorstep/Yours the killing cry. The presence of the Abiku, which the Igbo call ogbanje, brings sorrow and no good to the family. And despite that the members of the family wants a child, one that will stay with them, Abiku does not like the sweet company that awaits her in the family but likes to destroy the joy of the family by her “coming and going these several seasons”. The Abiku does not care how many times she has been disgraced at death so that she does not return until she has made up her mind to remain in the family, she see her reincarnation as a beautiful fun game. This is what JP Clark says about the Abiku: “For good. We know the knife scars/Serrating down your back and front/Like beak of the sword-fish,/And both your ears, notched/As a bondsman to this house,/Are all relics of your first comings./Then step in, step in and stay/For her body is tired,/Tired, her milk going sour/Where many more mouths gladden the heart.” The way Governor Rochas Okorocha is running his education policy reminds of the Abuki story and gives me the temptation to call it the Abiku policy. It also reminds me of the story of the fly that would heed no warnings but follows the rotten corpse to the grave where it will not have the time to enjoy a bit of it, contrary to what it thinks that it will have all the time to enjoy the corpse when left with it alone in the grave, where no man will disturb it; but the fly would be dead in the grave and will enjoy none of the corpse. It also reminds of the story of the king that refused to heed advice and rather messed himself up in a public place. It paints to me the picture of a people in trouble. I have written a lot about the free education policy of the current rescue mission government and I have always said my mind that the policy will not help us. My position is not born out of the fact of politics but patriotism because I see that the programme is all about displays of popularity and beautiful talks and gestures that do not add up to the equation of the wellbeing of the people or the future of the people. I see the free education policy as having list the opportunity to address the job creation value; and I see free education as having filled with a lot of lies and deceptions on the part of the government. I see the free education as being wasteful because it lacks no adequate planning. And if I may ask, what does the Governor want to achieve in the state, using his current free education model? If what the Government wants to achieve through the current free education policy is to see increase in enrolment in schools, then the policy can go on, but if the government wants to create value and address the issues of development and job availability, then the policy must go back to the engineers who must rewrite the education “software”. It must go back to the architects who must come up with better designs that would address the said issues. This free education is tormenting us like the Abiku. In this free education, we have seen a drop in the quality of education in the state. In this regime of free education when the government is building upstairs and importing chairs and school uniforms, our courses at the owned state university lose accreditation and nothing is being done about it. And in this regime when we should be thinking about what to do about the condition of education, when we should be talking what we want to do and where we want to be in the next ten years and tackling that through education, we are sitting idly talking about whether education should be paid or free; we are making proclamations after proclamation. The events of recent weeks have confirmed my position that the free education in the state is not worth it. They proved my claims that students of the state owned tertiary institutions pay fees (whatever it was/is called). Those events also showed that the students of the state are not happy with the way the programme of free education was been implemented. And they staged a protest! It was under the auspices of the National Imo Students Assembly (NISA) that the protest was staged on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, at the gate of the government house. They students stormed the government house in buses and trailers, numbering about one thousand, and demanded that of the Governor removed the fees paid by the students at IMSU and IMOPOLY. They particularly mentioned the payment of Acceptance Fee by the students which they put at N70,000. They also talked about the payment of charges by students to the banks for cheques issued by the state government for the purpose of the school fees of the students, and the group said the bank charge was about N20,000. They demanded a stop to such charges. They also asked the government to include the students of Imo State origin who are in federal government schools in the state. And last but not the least, they said that if the Governor did not grant their requests they would seize to support him. And you know what that means in an election period. It meant that the students could keep their votes from the Governor and give them to any other person, whether the Governor is running for the Presidency (which is most unlikely because a bird at hand is worth more than a million birds in the forest. The disquiet caused the government by the protest can be seen by the recent visit of the Governor to IMSU where he announced the extension of the free education programme to non-indigenes in the state owned tertiary institutions. That was not what the students asked for. They wanted the inclusion of the indigenous students studying in the Federal schools in the state and the removal of all charges paid by the students, since to them such payments ran polluted the free education policy of the government. granted that the Governor announced that the Acceptance Fees by the students should stop, the Governor has scored yet another blunder. And he has shown his liking for not taking advice; did you say his penchant for not taking advice? The announcement of the extension of the free education policy of the state government to the non-indigenes is only a political move ahead of the 2015 general elections. That is all; nothing more. That announcement does not show any planning; it does not intend to achieve anything tangible other than to secure the patronage of the school community. What is the value of free education if you cannot write your name? The Governor has shown once more that he has not understand the problems of education systems and that he does not know what to do to address the problems. By the announcement of the inclusion of non-indigenes in the free education the government not only is playing politics than addressing educational and developmental issues. What the government seems to illustrate is that the people of the state do not have access to education and that removing the fees would attract them to education; or that the people want education but cannot afford it. I have nothing against the government saying nobody should pay but I have a problem with the way the government is running the policy. For example, while the Governor was commissioning a recreation center for the students – I learnt that the recreation center cost the government millions of naira to build – and including the non-indigenes in the free education policy; the Law School and Medical School of IMSU have not regained their accreditation. Now, how did the government place the priority – to get back the accreditation or spend millions of naira to build a recreation center for the students? What will a recreation center do for the students if they cannot do Law or Medicine in the school? What will be the value of the recreation center if they cannot be part of the compulsory one year NYSC programme? What is the value of the recreation center if their certificates are not recognized anywhere in Nigeria for that matter after they have spent years in school? And tell me, what is the essence of the free education policy if in the end the students cannot do Law in the school? Would it not have been better if the government got its priorities right and spent millions of naira it spent on the recreation center to get back lost accreditation? Would it not have been better if the government decided to use the additional money the inclusion of the non-indigenes in the policy to improve the quality of education, and perhaps see that quality returns to the school system? The Governor is not asking the question of where these students he is giving free education will work when they leave school. This is the matter with our leaders and it is particularly a matter with this government: planlessness. You give free education and spend huge amount of money with a concrete developmental plan of how it will work for the state. Will these students upon graduation join Imo Security Network? Will they join Imo Civil Guard? Will they Imo State Vigiante? What job opportunities await for them upon graduation? As things stand in the state now, my nearest guess is that there are no job opportunities in the state for the students when they graduate, and there is nothing to show that these can even right their own names correctly when they leave school, unless we will start today to inject quality into the system. We want to see our state top the chart, and not sleep under the chart. If we churn huge numbers of graduates from the school and have no plans for them, of what use is it to the state and the graduates? If we do this, we will be putting the state on the road to insecurity. And this will be double tragedy for the state, because after spending huge sums of money and the programmme turns out not beneficial, we have wasted our money and the future of the state and those of the students; that is why we need a pragmatic approach to the education policy of the state: it has put into perspective the development and future of the state. It has to have a goal; it has to be well planned and executed. It has to be tied to job creation and employment opportunities. It has to make the state work. A careful planning of the education policy of the state will not only lift the state up, it will give the opportunity to be placed side by side with other states such as Lagos and Ogun State, and others like them. We have the time to do what is good for the state, and if for any reason we fail to do it, then we only have ourselves to blame collectively.
Okorocha
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