I’m often depressed when I think about Nigeria. The way things are run keeps me up at night, questioning why we don’t have enough passionate and deep thinking people in critical positions. But from my experience even at highest level of Governance, we have quality people...
...beaten to submission. These are people appointed based on their expertise yet prevented from functioning. These folks are blamed for everything they are not even at liberty to raise at meetings let alone fix by people deploying them gavel from afar.
It is understandable that “humans are bad at understanding things that are very far away in scale or time.” But it is becoming a religion to generalize based on our limited exposure or perception especially when analyzing government institutions mired in rivalry & bribery.
We shouldn’t have a Dog in any of these scattered battles at our combined expense. What we can do is to find the gap and hopefully see how this can be bridged. We live in a country where attempts to fix a derelict system can get you killed by those benefitting from the rot.
The kind of untold conflicts we have within critical institutions cripple the possibility of attaining harmony/unity needed for collaboration for MDAs to function in the interest of the country and people. Extrapolation is far easier to tweet & claim that it is to execute...
...especially when the people reading your posits in the papers, blogs or tweets probably have very different experiences, beliefs and expectations than you do. The assumption that everyone sees what we see is a trap that causes conflicts across board.
Education seems to have been designed as a form of indoctrination as a solace for those who failed to understand its core essence which is the trigger of critical thinking & application of self towards a better society. Most treat education as the hustle for a credentials.
We have been deploying the time served under these assembly line program to exchange compliance for certification with the assumption that institutions can change us. The Nigerian experience has proven otherwise at least in two decades of my conscious review.
The things I’ve learnt outside of the four walls of any institutions have proven that learning can’t be done to anyone. It remains a choice that mandates active participation and never a simple adherence to metrics or acting as directed within a dogmatic civil service.
I have chosen to view learning, unlearning and relearning as the only process that guarantees an encounter with resilience, possibility and contribution because learning is a lifelong skill that is void of domain dependency. I recall addressing an issue in 2017...
