Open Letter To Festus Aladesanmi
By Akin Owolabi
Dear Festus,
I read with utter disgust, your well written defence of a plan to rewrite the history of educational development in Ondo State. It is an unparalleled attempt to cast a deep pall over the educational advancement of the under-privileged young people of the state, whose only solace is to be educated for its sake bearing in mind that the attainment of the highest level is not a guarantee for gainful employment.
You made spirited attempt in that piece to give your class of Ondo State indigenes an unfettered access to the state funded education while the peons and scum, who make up more than 90 per cent of the population, can reside in your perceived ‘hottest part of hell’, assuming there is one. Your advocacy of education with ease for your class and tears and anguish for the lowly cadre is the height of hypocrisy dripping with extreme callousness and crass insensitivity to the plight of the citizenry.
Your attempt at education revisionism is the most beautiful nonsense I have read in recent times as it was veiled to deal treacherously with the impoverished people of Ondo State and I hope to make you see reasons for my scathing remark.
I beg here to use the inverted pyramidal method to x-ray the piece eminently designed to massage the ego of ruling class. And this has to do with the issue of your two daughters – one, six years old and, the other in her teens. You stated that you are (present continuous tense please) paying N120,000 per term for the education of your six-year-old at an average private school, probably in Oba-Ile near Akure or thereabout and a meagre (about) N30,000 per session for your teenager’s university education at the Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba, also in the state.
Let me take you up here. Your ability to waste as much as a minimum of N360,000 annually on a six-year-old puts you up as one of the nouveau riche of our time. Your attempt to give your younger daughter an early start amounts to jumping the gun. The norms, which I tag ‘anachronism’, is that a child should properly latch on to the formal education system at age six. But you started your unnamed daughter earlier than the anachronistics would recommend. You are not alone in this awkward perception of what education ought to be. Yet, I still put it to you that the money committed to this early child education is enough to cater for 20 children of that age in your locality.
It is not a crime to be rich. But it is callous to flaunt your riches to the extent of jeopardising the chances of those who are very far below your level of financial accomplishments. Your class is still far from the upper caste in this highly stratified society where only the end justifies the means. Nobody should frown at whoever intends to hobnob with the powers that be in Ondo State for pecuniary reasons. However, it is a crime against humanity to do this by toying with the wellbeing of the generality of the people.
If your ability to pay N360,000 a year for a small girl’s education is the average parental obligation in your dream world, you still should tell the world the maximum and also descend to the rock bottom where some are hard put to buy a pair of uniform for their children.
There is an irony in your piece. You have the capacity to squander N0.36 million on a six-year-old, yet you descend to the beggarly status of putting your teenaged daughter in a state university where the tuition fees, your perceived lowest in the South West, is a meagre N30,000 per annum. What a sense of disequilibrum! Easy to see your discomfort here. Others in or about your class send their children to overseas countries – Harvard in the United States, Cambridge in Britain and Toronto in Canada. But yours is still in the rural town of Akungba. Yet, others patronise Covenant University, Bells University of Technology, Redeemers, the one in Yola, Adamawa and several others where the commercialisation of intelligence is in vogue. Yet your precious 19-year-old daughter is still found among the floatsam at Akungba. It is therefore your desire to weed out those whose parents are at their wits’ end to keep their tertiary education-famished children in that clime where disruption of academic calendar has become a passion.
It should interest you, dear Festus, that there are parents – father and mother – whose cumulative yearly income does not sum up to the N120,000 you pay per term for your six-year-old and still they struggle to keep their brilliant children in the university you are asking your political mentors to raise its tuition bar.
Less I forget, you broached on the salient issues of infrastructural development but failed to mention that the best approach to it is human, the development of the youth, the vibrant ones who would ultimately replace the grey-bearded senior advocate currently occupying the Ondo Government House, Akure. The best development, for emphasis, is through functional, accessible education for the young ones. That is why the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – UNESCO – pontificated that governments should endeavour to commit at least 26 per cent of their annual budget to education, a clause developing nations observe only in the breach. The pertinent question is: what percentage of this year’s budget has Governor Rotimi Akeredolu committed to this critical social sector in Ondo State?
The type of development Festus canvassed – infrastructural – is the boulevard through which governments of developing countries revel in corruption and line individuals’ pockets. The contractual system in public administration is so inflated, stultifyingly compromised that what is spent on project execution is almost next to nothing. It often takes less than 20 per cent of the amount of a contract award to execute the project and this monumental fraud or the real corruption outside the individual stealing, is hidden under the veneer of due process.
I often laugh at President Muhammadu Buhari, who has left untreated the corruption leprosy and has been dissipating energy on skin rashes which is the individual looting. The plain truth is that the worst form of brigandage – contract awards – remains pervasive right before the president’s face. The more you look, the less you see.
Since there is no known way out of the corruption mire, let the type canvassed by Festus remain business as usual, more so as Governor Akeredolu must recoup his huge electoral expenses somehow. Can Festus please tell the people of Ondo State in particular how much Arakunrin (for whatever that appellation means) spent in vote buying at the polls about a year ago when all who endorsed his candidature went home with between N5,000 and N10,000? How will the governor recoup his huge election expenses? The only way Akeredolu could get his money back is through contract awards which Festus linked with development. Treasury looting could be in pari passu.
There is no other way the governor could get his vote buying money back and also line his pocket for a second term project than roll out contracts in appreciable number. Development, yes, but not at the expense of the real development (educational) of the young ones in Ondo State.
My passion for education is total. I started formal education at about age six in January 1954, a year preceding Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s free education programme in Western Region. I could not go beyond the secondary modern school system but that was enough for me to return to the classroom more than 15 years later after scaling the two levels of General Certificate of Education – GCE. I climbed the ladder by enrolling for a Ph.D programme at the University of Lagos in early 1990 but voluntarily pulled out, an action I continue to regret. It is a disservice to humanity for any individual to embark on any revisionist course in the area of access to education. Festus and his sponsors, if any, must back down from the unpatriotic design to snatch education from the hands of Ondo State youths.
If Dr. Olusegun Mimiko could sustain the educational system in Ondo State for eight years, Arakunrin Akeredolu too can. Anything less is antithetical to the wellbeing of the majority of the people.
Mr. Owolabi, an indigene of Ondo State, lives in Ota, Ogun State
