HOPE BASKET TO CARRY PEPERSOUP

     Okello Oculi lists many of the challenges in the system

On 27^th August, 2023 a total of 17,000 lawyers registered to physically participate in a conference for ‘’charting the Course of Nigeria’s Nation Building’’. It was said to be the “largest gathering of lawyers in the world’’.

  In 2021, South Korea had a total of 12,000 lawyers but a total of 61,000 engineers. Korea’s universities had awarded engineering degrees to a total of 89.000 graduates.

While Nigeria evolved under British colonial political engineering, Korea had suffered under Japanese domination. Despite Britain’s leadership of Europe’s industrial revolution, Nigerians who studied there during the 1900s studied Law;  not engineering and experiences inside foundries of manufacturing industries.

 Nigeria’s 2023 elections dramatised the economic power of lawyers’ Wigs and gowns, while Korea’s brands of vehicles dominated Nigeria’s roads. Since that divergence is neglected in Nigeria’s debt, it must affect the balance of education against engineering.

The ‘HOPE BASKET’ was preceded by a season of awarding contracts for building ‘’Overhead Bridges’’; purchasing scores of vehicles for Police Units, ‘’Traditional Rulers’’ and legislators; constructing flood control infrastructure, etc., were linked to benefiting foreign workers and contractors NOT the ever-rising flood by the river of ‘’Youth Unemployment’’.

 Bulldozers uprooted trees, scooped high mounds of soil and were paid for in billions of American Dollars to foreign contractors while power in minds and muscles of local youth fermented in poverty and rage.

China and South Korea experienced both brutal and positive values from Japanese colonialism, notably vital pride in Oriental identity, and injecting Euro-American industrialisation with Buddhism.

  An Asian race building economic and military power to defeat feudal Russia, and driving Dutch, British, French, and Spanish colonialists out of Asia, was lesson in reliance on SELF.

 Japan’s ‘’cutting off’’ heads of brutal and greedy Tokugawa aristocrats as parasites on peasant farmers left a legacy of anti-corruption as vital for urgent progress and industrial progress.

  France, Britain, Communist Russia and the United States were clear models.

The ‘HOPE BASKET’ inherited a criminal trick by departing British colonialists of rigging elections to block Mallam Aminu Kano’s Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and his allies in Bornu Youth Movement; bashing the Zikist Movement and Awolowo’s socialist impulses. Its creeping and stubborn grip has, since the January 1966 military coup, been called ‘’CORRUPTION’’.

The ‘HOPE BASKET’ could borrow Paul KAGAME’s strategy of using education for POLITICAL ENGINEERING to reverse what Belgian colonialists and their Catholic Clergy used to entrench conflict between those who owned more than THREE COWS, and others, among a people who owned a common language and ancestry. The Japanese, British, French, Americans and Germans also use INTENSIVE education to invent promoters of social progress and industrial productivity. 

A senior American diplomat told research staff at Ahmadu Bello University that Nigeria’s education would collapsed following the 1986 devaluation of the Naira. The ‘HOPE BASKET’ caught Canada, Britain and the United States of America cynically ‘kidnappings’ brilliant secondary school victims of that collapse.

The massive volume of narcotic drugs regularly intercepted by official agencies suggests a plot to degrade the quality of Nigeria’s human resources with drug addiction; while drug induced atavistic violence ruins trust in government’s capacity for protecting peaceful community productivity and living. During the pre-election period the ploy seemed to be to deny votes to the governing party. The ‘HOPE BASKET’ must resist global biochemical invasion of sovereignty.

Reports about academic grades traded for sex are destructive for the economy. An essay in THE HAVARD BUSINESS REVIEW asserted that American multinationals moved their businesses to China to benefit from high quality learning under a Buddhist cultural environment which indoctrinates workers to deliver high quality products, while their lower wages are supplements by government providing cheap housing and healthcare. 

Practices of parents funding fraud in examination scores fuel negative reports by foreign diplomats about the quality of degrees and diplomas awarded by Nigeria’s educational institutions, thereby, repelling investors from the economy.

A NATIONAL PRESIDENTIAL BROADCAST to combat intellectual laziness which inhibits uses of Nigeria’s diverse languages for university lectures, publication of textbooks and research reports is overdue for fertilising original creativity. India’s universities conduct academic lectures in major languages of their regions.  By 2023 India’s scientists were the first to land a satellite on the southern sector of the MOON. The HOPE BASKET must evolve beyond hawking Kolanuts and Fried Plantain.

  The Media in Africa must avoid the plot of mobilising talents of youth into pop music, sports, modelling, fashion and pornography. African Americans have been victims of such ‘’mind-bending’’ diversion of talents. The Nigerian Diaspora in Euro-America are putting up a good fight. Barack Obama’s presidency was a valuable moment for high status racial symbolism.

There are challenges here for a Nigeria ‘Season of Hope’ to carry Palm Wine.  

Prof Oculi writes from Abuja