The Teacher Who Could Not Not Read

Evidently, we are not listening enough to Albert
Einstein (1879-1955): “Life is like a bicycle. To
keep your balance, you must keep moving”. We keep increasing the level of rationalisation in
our society, in the process of which we get fixated
at offering excuses for our failure. At the mention of the poor performance of our
children in English Language tests, we quickly
point at the direction of the Short Massage Service,
SMS, as a major distraction, whereas the SMS has
always been with us. In the past, they were called
telegrams and we used them quite often. The fact that a student sent a telegram home, “CONDITION
CRITICAL X SEND MONEY” did not prevent him from
writing the best letter in his English language
class the following day. The Holy Books make it clear that there is nobody
that God did not endow with particular talents.
The only difference is that while some discover
their God-given talents early enough; those who
do not discover theirs force themselves into areas
where they do not belong. That teacher who could not read her own affidavit
of age declaration could as well have been a huge
success in some aspects of merchandising. Elsewhere, assisting people to discover their
talents is a major function of the education
system, starting from very early in life. We all make mistakes sometimes. In an
unplanned society like ours, luck plays a role in
straightening us out. I have sometimes strayed
into areas where I did not belong but I did not
wait to be disgraced out. In our secondary school
days, I once found myself in a dance club but I quickly bounced out after cutting some shoes of
my dance partners. I was clumsy. In fact, I had
two left legs. But by the time I moved into the
literary and debating society, I became the one to
beat. That was how I found myself in a tennis club. I
quickly got out when it became clear that the only
direction I could play was aiming at the sky. Rather than mitigate the problem, society helps to
aggravate it. You can imagine if I had forced
myself into becoming the one to teach our young
ones to dance or better still, if I had bought my
way into becoming the one to prepare our tennis
players for the next Olympics. That would be a total disaster and that’s exactly what we are doing
to ourselves and our nation in virtually every field. We are largely a bunch of sadists, even to
ourselves. We entertain ourselves with ludicrous
events, the amount of venom we release into
society, notwithstanding. In this Edo State, we
once had a Commissioner who couldn’t spell
“Commissioner”. For her, the word must shed weight by force and the only way to do so was to
eliminate the double letters and she came up with
“Comisioner” as her own version of the word. We were pleasantly entertained on television but
that did not prevent her from being picked as a
Commissioner, even where some Senior
Advocates of Nigeria, SAN, and other seemingly
more qualified nominees had to be screened out
to make way for her. In other climes, some citizen action groups would have stopped that
appointment! You can imagine what type of
Commissioner we had in “Mrs Comisioner”. Let no one be deceived. That teacher who could
not read is not alone in that category. They are
many. Whereas our system is still relatively able to
sift the “Commissioners” from the “Comisioners”;
and whereas the teachers who can read and those
who cannot are not in short supply here, the differentiation should be made by sound
personnel practice at that point of recruitment.
But where is that entry point? When a chief executive wants to engage any
particular person, even a stubborn legislature can
hardly stop him. For example, Prof. Borisade
Babalola holds the clear record of being tossed
between the Executive and the Legislature close to
five times before his nomination was finally confirmed. Again, the initial rejections of that
ebullient Professor were not because he was
found wanting but the murky politics of Ondo
State had an axe to grind with him. Our Education Boards have always paraded some
of the best and most experienced brains. But
while a Board may spend its entire tenure without
officially appointing a single teacher, letters of
appointment of teachers are “hawked”
progressively at the market place, under the candle light, with perhaps some insider
collaboration. Between Boards, such illicit
appointments get regularised. True, Rome was not built in a day. We have now
arrived at that dangerous point where there are
teachers who cannot read and these are the
people in whose hands the fate of our future
leaders lies. These people did not suddenly find
themselves unable to read. Once blocking starts, it never ends. They even
block their way through the PhD. Sadly, the
loudest critics of any system are to be found in
this category. But luckily, too, even where the thief
has every day, the owner still has his single day. That woman also got her share of infamy: had she
fallen into a pit toilet, a sachet of N20 detergent
would have cleaned her up; had she been
diagnosed for some serious ailment, by now she
would have been completing her medication; but
in split seconds, her inability to read had incurably destroyed her for life, particularly when she
involuntarily relinquished her “Ekiadolor papers”
to Oshiomhole – “Who is now the teacher?” “You
are the one, Sir”. Shall we return to Tai Solarin who once opined
that the only way to sanitise Lagos was to bomb
down the entire place and begin to rearrange it?
More than four decades after, Solarin is still
waiting to happen, but it has taken some extra-
radical steps to begin to turn Lagos around. Essentially, Nigeria is still possible. Just pray and
hope!