Education: Group proffers solutions at Rivers book presentation

Host of the quarterly August Meeting in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital and education promoter, Kingsley Wali, has warned the Nigerian government to be cautious about the growing negative cliche ‘Education Is Scam’ among the young generation of Nigerians.

He gave the warning at the second quarter of the August Meeting, held in Port at the weekend, decrying the lack of government investment in education.

Speaking at the event, during which the book, ‘Grit’ written by  Gomba Obari was presented and reviewed, Wali explained that lack of education incentives, especially graduate unemployment, was a major cause of the growing disinterest in education among the youths of the country.

He said, “People go through school and they come out, with no jobs, so why do I have to take school seriously? This has led us to a point where our younger generation is saying that education is a scam.’’

“That’s something that should bother the government. Because you are grooming a generation of people who are not educated and of course, we know the implications of that.

“What it quickly translates into is a people who don’t understand what is happening around them and if they don’t understand, they don’t have hopes and so they just do whatever they want to do.”

He stated that the mission of the August Meeting was to fill the big gap between writing and reading in Nigeria, beginning from Port Harcourt.

He said, “As we have always said, we discovered that there was a big gap between writing and reading and we equally realized the fact that because people were not reading, they were not keeping tabs on things around them.

“But most importantly, even the ones that were written didn’t talk about Nigeria and our issues.

“So what we are trying to do is to get our people to read, by reading books written by Nigerians about Nigeria, so our people can get to know their country a lot better. So you don’t have children from Sokoto State who don’t know anything about Rivers State.

“So what we are trying to do is to bridge the gap between reading and writing, not forgetting the fact that even those who are writing are having issues.

“People don’t read, because people don’t read they (the writers) the numbers out there are not much, publishers are not even interested.

“I mean what are they publishing for especially when you look at, even most of our authors have to go outside to publish their books and who would want to publish books that the order is 100,000 copies? It’s not encouraging and it doesn’t help the writers.

“So it leaves us in the darkness of reading. So what we are trying to do is to see how far we can reignite the reading culture, which has a trickle-down effect on the encouragement it gives to people to even write.

“We need to boost the motivation to even write because if you write and people don’t read, it’s not worth anything. So we are trying to marry all of them – get people to publish, create an atmosphere that will allow their books to be read and as much as helping the community to know the society better.

Speaking at the event, Dr. Youpele Banigo, Associate Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria emphasised the need for people to know their story and be able to tell it so as not to allow outsiders to do it for them.

He enthused, “You need to learn your stories or people tell you your story. Go and rescue and record your story, if not someone else will tell it to your children.”

He lamented the lack of interest among the people in learning about their history noting that except people know their true story they could be exploited and manipulated by outsiders who would claim to know it.

He urged, “We need to speedily engage the ageing population of experts in our society and see what we can harvest from them before they go. They are the custodians of our past, the custodians of our history.”

Also speaking, a one-time Secretary to the Rivers State Government, Amleruchi Cookey-Gam, commended the efforts of the organisers of the event, describing it as a worthy effort in trying to correct so many things going wrong in Nigerian society.

She said, “We need to be individualistic in our efforts to redeem the country at our very little sphere of influence.

“Nigeria is a complex nation and we should be cautious and patriotic to offer ideas that will move the country forward.

“We are moving backwards and it’s obvious the leadership is not serious about moving the country forward. We must therefore make our changes that will make the difference.”

The highlight of the event was the draw for secondary schools to participate in the Education Champion League, also sponsored by the group, to be held in September.