Education for Sustainable Development of Kirike Be Se

By Professor Joseph Atubokiki Ajienka, an address delivered at the Wakirike USA Convention 2015

Let me begin this by thanking the organisers of this event, Wakirike USA for inviting me and for making education the theme of this year’s convention. The United Nations declared 2005 to 2014 the decade for education and so we are a bit late in getting on the bandwagon. Nevertheless, education as a means of sustainable development is a very important and urgent matter to address at this point in our history.

To appreciate how important education can be to transforming the thinking and habits of our people let me describe to you what goes on in our homeland at the moment. Amongst the young men of Okrika, we have people:

Who have made themselves into warlords, following from the wars we have had with our neighbours. These are armed youth for hire and when they do not have “jobs” harass their neighbours. They are the ones who are responsible for election rigging, kidnapping and other ills in society.

Those who have made some money from “bunkering,” a fancy word for crude oil theft and its sale on the black market. These young men are unable to make meaning of their lives because they do not know how to and stick with this unsustainable but very lucrative means of economic development until they are killed by accidents related to the illegal trade or by the bullets of security agents, or they are jailed.

There is the group that is involved in illegal refining of stolen crude into diesel or “kpo fire” refineries as they are called. These are a totally intolerable menace, because they do two things to our communities: they cause severe environmental degradation, and they are uncontrollable because they are “rich” and exert immense peer pressure on other young men to follow in their path.

These newly rich young men are bereft of moral values and are the ones who are becoming chiefs and providing leadership to our war canoe houses in Okrika. I’ll leave you to imagine where we will be ten years from now.

What of the women then? I am afraid they are not faring any better. I had a woman complain at a town hall meeting about a year ago that Okrika girls are becoming unmarriageable. The hardworking Okrika girl who was respectful and carefully groomed to be a wife and mother is nearly extinct. Instead, we now have ill-tempered and ill-mannered young women who will do anything to make ends meet. The prevalence of unmarried young women having children is too high. The consequence is that these young women cannot continue in school and soon become a burden on the society. It is said that if you train a woman, you train a whole community. If we are unable to train our young women, it follows that we are slowly but steadily losing our communities. A number of them are engaged in small scale businesses but we do not want a majority of our women selling bread and dried fish and isam because that is the best they can be. It appears at the moment that no one who is allowed to grow up in Okrika of today will amount to much.

I grew up in Okrika believing three things: the Okrika man is a very proud man, he will rather die of starvation than steal from another person; he will never enrich himself by fetish or diabolical means, because the land will reject him when he dies (ora ari bia). It was a place where a child grew up with a lot of values. So, how did we go from being the proud nation that produced a giant like Professor Tekena Nitonye Tamuno to one that glorifies oil thieves and murderers? This is precisely the reason why this is as good a time as any to launch a sustained effort aimed at freeing our people from the shackles of ignorance and to restore our value system.

The ordinary definition of education is the acquisition of knowledge and or skills. Proper education should therefore result in good upbringing especially as it concerns correct social behavior and the preservation of culture and values of a people, as it also involves the transfer of knowledge of the beliefs and habits of a group of people from one generation to another. This transfer of knowledge and skills usually occurs under the tutelage of someone else (a teacher) but individuals may also educate themselves. It is believed that any experience that has a formative effect on the way an individual thinks, feels or acts may be considered educational. Education is therefore not just about learning in a classroom. Proper education has the power to shape the way we feel about things and events, it affects the way we think, how we approach difficulties and it influences the way we live our lives.

Sustainable development is defined by the 1987 Brutland Commission Report as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Source Book adds that “sustainability is a paradigm for thinking about a future in which environmental, social and economic considerations are balanced in the pursuit of development and an improved quality of life. These three spheres – society, environment and economy – are intertwined. For example, a prosperous society relies on a healthy environment to provide food and resources, safe drinking water, and clean air for its citizens.” Education for sustainable development will make it possible for every Okrika person to acquire the knowledge, skills, attributes and values necessary to shape a sustainable future. This means including key sustainable development issues into teaching and learning e.g. climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, poverty reduction and sustainable consumption.

I believe very strongly that education can transform kirike Se and as Monibo Sam told me in a recent conversation, “it can make Okrika be the go to place” in Rivers State.

Let us address how this can be achieved.

Education occurs in stages: preschool, primary school, secondary school, tertiary school (I have not said university because in Nigeria there are several options at this level, including Colleges of Education, Polytechnics, and Universities). Although the right of all citizens to an education is recognized by our government in Nigeria and in many states including our own, primary education is free in public schools, attendance at school is still poor. This is not unconnected with the fact that many families are extremely poor. Books and uniforms are free, however, a child who goes to school will require lunch when he returns from school or during school and dinner too. If the parents cannot afford it on a regular basis, the child will have to miss school on some days to help generate income for the household by hawking “pure water” or kerosene or plantain or dry fish. He may in fact, not attend school at all because he has to accompany his or parents to the fishing port to help out.

This should be our first point of intervention. We should find the resources to mobilise all school-age children to school and find ways of keeping them there. The goal here is to ensure that we have an entire community of people with basic literacy. I heard a suggestion by the Vice President-elect of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, during a town hall meeting with the people of Lagos that I liked very much. He said the Federal Government (if he and Buhari were elected) will give N5,000 monthly to every poor woman, who makes sure that her kid is fully immunized against childhood diseases and enrolls the kid in school. The payment will only be sustained if that child remains in school. Although, this may appear to involve a lot of money in payouts, it also means that our kids get to live healthier and longer and the Government will make savings on public health expenditure and the invaluable gain of mass literacy. They have been elected now and so let us hope that given our current economic difficulties they will get round to keeping this promise.

An alternative is something that has been tried by governments (such as India) and some local councils in the North of Nigeria and that is offering free lunch as a way of mobilizing children to school. This way, poor parents do not have to worry about what their kids will eat when they return from school. Additionally, we have to find ways for our children to fall in love with books and the adventure that reading books represents. To do this, we need to have attractive libraries that stand out in every school. Libraries so attractive, kids have a reason to look forward to school every week.

These proposals will cost a lot of money and so we shall need government to buy into this idea. Wakirike Development Coalition has had a very productive relationship with the Okrika Local Government Council in the past and it is my belief that such a relationship can be re-negotiated to realise our vision.

The next stage of intervention should be the learning environment in our schools and the quality of teachers that are employed to teach our kids. We should pay a lot of attention to retraining the teachers employed in our schools so that they deliver the quality of education we desire for our children. According to Tilbury and Wortman, the following skills are essential to Education for Sustainable Development:

Envisioning – being able to picture a better future. This is based on the understanding that if one knows where we wants to go, he/she will be better able to work out how to get there.

Critical thinking and reflection – learning to question our current belief systems and to recognize the assumptions underlying our knowledge, perspective and opinions. Critical thinking skills help people learn to examine economic, environmental, social and cultural structures in the context of sustainable development.

Systemic thinking – an approach to problem solving, that sees “problems” as parts of an overall system, rather than reacting to specific parts, outcomes or events, and thereby potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences. Systems thinking is not one thing but a set of habits or practices within a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. Systems thinking focuses on cyclical rather than linear cause and effect.

Building partnerships – promoting dialogue and negotiation, learning to work together.

Participation in decision-making – empowering people

We should work to reintroduce the teaching of the Okrika language in our schools. I learnt to read tatari go diri as a student of Boys’ State School. We should ensure they teach our children our history and about our cultural icons.

Also, we need to evolve a plan to improve the school environment. Okrika Grammer School is one of the oldest secondary schools in Rivers State. However, it, like many secondary schools is a shadow of itself. In truth, we do not have a secondary school that is worth its name in Okrika. It will make a lot of sense to improve these schools so that they can deliver quality education to our children. The school environment should be one that impressionable kids will want to replicate in their homes. There is no reason why our schools should not have modern learning tools, exemplary sanitation standards, and an environment that inspires learning. A young Okrika man just a few weeks ago, volunteered to completely renovate the old maternity home on Okrika Island. We have people who can help us actualize these ideas, I am certain.

The third intervention should be to ensure adequate motivation for the teaching staff of all our schools. There was a time when people chose to be teachers because they were passionate about imparting knowledge in others. Then, teachers truly learnt the science and the art of pedagogy.  Now, we have very good looking primary schools in every Local Government built at great expense and yet the number of private primary schools are growing daily. It does not take a rocket scientist or a Ben Carson to figure out that something is not right. What I find particularly saddening is that the teachers in these public schools send their kids elsewhere to have an education. The teachers who do this do not earn enough to afford private education for their kid or kids and so they come to school with wares ranging from kitchen utensils to under clothes to sell, when they come at all. The challenge for all of us is to ensure that schools serve their purpose. We have to collectively find a way to make sure that teachers engaged to teach in a public school see that it benefits them as much as us, when they actually teach. Private schools in our setting should be for those who feel the need to be different and not for the majority of us as is the case at the moment. This is an attitude we need to adopt, if we are to make a difference with and in the education of our young ones. A few years ago, Shell and NLNG paid an extra stipend to doctors and nurses in Bonny Local Government to encourage this category of workers to accept postings to the LGA and to motivate them to stay and to deliver quality health care in line with their vision. I acknowledge that we are neither Shell nor NLNG but we can consider doing a similar thing, even if it is not on the same scale.

Peter Senge, scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management says “we all have probably spent too much time thinking about ‘smart individuals.’ That’s one of the problems with schools. They are very individualistic, very much about ‘the smart kids and the dumb kids.’ That’s not the kind of smartness we need. The smartness we need is collective. We need cities that work differently. We need industrial sectors that work differently. We need value change and supply change that are managed from the beginning until the end to purely produce social, ecological and economic well-being. That is the concept of intelligence we need, and it will never be achieved by a handful of smart individuals. It’s not about ‘the smartest guys in the room.’ It’s about what we can do collectively. So the intelligence that matters is collective intelligence, and that’s the concept of ‘smart’ that I think will really tell the tale.”

The award of scholarships to promising students is one of the easiest implementable strategies in producing highly educated individuals. Please note that the operative word is individuals. While these individuals usually cause an improvement in the standard of living of their immediate families, influence and sometimes contribute to the education of others and alleviate the manpower development needs of their communities, this measure does not bring about the transformation that I propose. I have therefore left it to last deliberately. If it is all we can manage at the moment, fair enough but we need to aim higher, aim at reaching everyone. When we are able to lift everyone to a minimum standard, we can aim to train the exceptional ones. People who can afford it can adopt these promising young ones for further education and we can as a group continue to find opportunities through corporate sponsorship or government scholarship for these ones. Our goal should however, be to free the majority of our people to think independently, make informed choices, to become more aware of the world around them and to be more involved in their governance, to independently access information on the issues that concern them personally and collectively, to freely pursue happiness, to understand their rights and to fight to defend them, to make our people truly free.

Let us begin our decade of education.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity and privilege of delivering this address.

Professor Joseph Atubokiki Ajienka Vice Chancellor, University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria