[caption id="attachment_28511" align="alignright" width="300"] Niyi Osundare:“I also know that degrees from Nigeria are being shunned abroad. In our days, if you had your first class or second class upper, all the universities abroad will be struggling to get you with scholarship. Today, they don’t even recognize our first class. I get calls from friends wanting to know what is happening to education in Nigeria.”[/caption] Erudite poet and scholar, PROFESSOR NIYI OSUNDARE, recently spoke to newsmen in Ibadan about the disturbing state of education, his experience of Katrina, literary expendition and expectations from the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration. GBENRO ADESINA was also there Q: Do you agree with Professor Wole Soyinka that state of emergency should be declared in the education sector? A: When Soyinka declared a state of emergency in the educational sector in asking the government to close down schools for a year during which drastic steps will be taken to fix the sector, we all laughed. Some people even said that Soyinka is here again with his exaggeration. Not quite so long after, we knew that he was correct because the educational system in Nigeria is near collapse. I must say that to put education right in Nigeria, we will need the service of Professor Ayo Bamgbose. He is the best to talk about the educational system of this country. He has been around for over 50 years in the educational system. He knew the kind of educational system that produced people like him and he knows the kind of educational system that we have now. There is a lot of work to be done. We are certificating people without educating them. Our graduates know too little. J. O. Fagunwa did not go to any university. His last formal education was St Andrews College, Oyo. Look at the works Fagunwa did, both in Yoruba and English. I wonder how many Nigerian professors of English, Journalism, and Communication can do what that man did. The educational system at that time was solid. By the time I left Amoye Grammar School in 1966, the foundation for my education was already laid and it was solid while the university only added a little bit here and there. I fall back to what I learnt in the ‘60s in secondary school when I teach today. This is what I teach. Our educational system at the moment is horrible. If you open the pages of our newspapers, what do you find? Errors. [caption id="attachment_28511" align="alignright" width="300"] Niyi Osundare:“Katrina taught me that material things are just material things that you could be disposed of any time. Katrina taught me that everything we possess end up in possessing us. The more you have, the more you are possessed. The more you have, the more you are asked. For two weeks, my wife and I were just all over the place. I left my house without a pair of shoes. My shirt was torn. Water had taken everything we had away. We had money in our bag, but we didn’t have money to buy food until the Red Cross and aid agencies came to our assistance. At the Red Cross centre, I was there among hundreds of other people, ordinary man.”[/caption] Books of poems are full of grammatical errors. When you point it out to the poet, he or she will say, it is not an error but a poetic license. Poetic license does not come through the innocence of error. It has to be deliberate and creative. A lot of works from the elementary stage to the university need to be done. I have met many people who have doctorate degree in English who cannot distinguish between an adjectival clause and adverbial clause. We learnt those things in form one in 1961. I am talking from anger. I also know that degrees from Nigeria are been shunned abroad. In our days, if you had your first class or second class upper, all the universities abroad will be struggling to get you with scholarship. Today, they don’t even recognize our first class. I get calls from friends wanting to know what is happening to education in Nigeria. The ‘Ministries of education of European and America countries also call me to find out about the problems facing our educational sector. They know Nigeria more than our leaders know. They send report to their governments on how to treat candidates coming from Nigeria. We are not saying that the new generations are bad. No, they are so bright. What they can do with computer, I can never do, but there are basic things that need to be known and taught which they don’t know. Why? Because their teachers were not taught and didn’t know and you can’t give what you don’t have. We have to get serious. Teachers have to be more serious. They have to respect their students. The greatest work in the world is teaching. I have never seen a great person who never had a teacher. Teaching and teachers are extremely important. The Nigerian government has devalued teachers. We who teach must revalue ourselves. We must not give to the philistines who are ruling us. Again, teachers at any level in Nigeria must respect their students. Don’t violate their rights in any way. Don’t go late to their lectures; don’t cheat them of their time. When they give you their assignment, go through it and give them good correction. In those days, the likes of Bamgbose, Banjos, Adelugbas, Adeyinkas and Adedejis encouraged me to be a teacher. I was encouraged to come into teaching because I saw these good teachers not because of money. When I started teaching in University of Ibadan, UI, in October 1974, my salary was about N1,200 a year. I bought my first car at Leventis, brand new Renault 12 at N1,700. We didn’t earn too much but society respected us. I have every reason to be angry about this country. How can I not be angry? I have children and I have a stake in the future of this country. Teachers should take their job more seriously. We should be different from those who rule us. Our children should take their work seriously and be more inquisitive. If you don’t read, you will not know what to write. You have to work hard. Make friends with the library and books. [caption id="attachment_28511" align="alignright" width="300"] Niyi Osundare:“But Nigeria government succeeded tremendously last year in tackling Ebola. People in America were saying go to Nigeria and learn how to control Ebola. We give that to the government of Lagos State and by extension, the Federal Government. This will show us that we are not a lost country. If things are put right, we can do it well.”[/caption] Q: What do you mean by, “certificating not educating”? A: It took countries abroad a long time to get to where they are. The British plan our educational system to suit themselves but they also left something behind. Our system started going down the moment they left. Their system is different from ours. In Britain, the polytechnic system came into being immediate after the 2nd world war. Europe was producing many students and the university couldn’t take all of them. They wanted a stop gap but not just a stop gap; they wanted a kind of institution that would take care of technical people or technologist, or such like middle level man power. They worked on it and did it very well that HND is equivalent to B.Sc. HND graduate can go as far as PhD level. But in Nigeria, HND is devalued. In like term, we have devalued degree itself. The degree we are celebrating is not market valuable. Your certificate doesn’t make you, but the education that has been instilled in you. It is not the number of books you read but the kind of books you have read. The problem today is that we are producing the so called educated but illiterate people. That you are in one field doesn’t say that you should not be able to say something about the other fields. Many of our students leave university really knowing very little. We are producing so many illiterate people. It is because they are not well taught. How can you say you have a degree in Journalism, History, Communication, Theatre Arts, and you don’t write essays? In our days, you had to write an essay every week. You know how to write by writing. Imagine a graduate of Communication who writes essays that is full of errors. He may not even know how the paragraphs are organized, or the law of concord because he is not taught. You have the certificate but you don’t have the education. Q: What are the lessons you learnt from Katrina? A: It will take me an elephant mouth to answer that question. The lessons are many. Katrina taught me that material things are just material things that you could be disposed of any time. Katrina taught me that everything we possess end up in possessing us. The more you have, the more you are possessed. The more you have, the more you are asked. For two weeks, my wife and I were just all over the place. I left my house without a pair of shoes. My shirt was torn. Water had taken everything we had away. We had money in our bag, but we didn’t have money to buy food until the Red Cross and aid agencies came to our assistance. At the Red Cross centre, I was there among hundreds of other people, ordinary man. Nobody knew this is a poet or a great professor. I was a Katrina evacuee. I didn’t enjoy the experience but I learnt a lot that I will never forget. On disaster control, Katrina showed me that no country is beyond mistake. One would have thought that a country like America would have taken care of such a disaster easily. No, America didn’t. This is the reason hundreds of people perished in Katrina and why I nearly died. For about four days, there was no sign that there was any government in America. We were just there moving from one evacuated centre to another. A whole city was under water. There was no rescue plans. It took one week for helicopter to come and start evacuating us. You can imagine not having a bath, not brushing your teeth for eight days and that was in America. It showed the weakness of that country and I think the country has also learnt from it. [caption id="attachment_28512" align="alignright" width="300"] Niyi Osundare:“We are driving them away in the name of foreign religion. The religion we practice here is of the people of the Middle East. Why must we destroy what is ours? Yoruba culture is extremely accommodating. You can add all these together and still function.”[/caption] The important thing is not to make a mistake, the important thing is to learn from that mistake and our country Nigeria has a lot to learn from that. Everything in this country meets us by surprise. Our country is never prepared. We are lucky that there is no disaster in this country like earthquakes, no major tornadoes. Remember few years ago when we had flood in some parts of the country, it caught all our government arms down. But Nigeria government succeeded tremendously last year in tackling Ebola. People in America were saying go to Nigeria and learn how to control Ebola. We give that to the government of Lagos State and by extension, the Federal Government. This will show us that we are not a lost country. If things are put right, we can do it well. Q: What kind of change are you expecting from the Buhari-led administration? A: At the moment, I am putting that change in inverted commas because that is what politicians promise us and I don’t trust politicians. APC has to be extremely careful. You are PDP in the morning and by afternoon you are in LP and in the evening you are in APC. That is what Nigerian politicians are doing to us. They do not mean well for the people of this country. Most of our politicians are rogues. Quote me, they know it. Otherwise, our country will not be like this. The APC came, we embraced its change. I hope it will be the real change that we want, not a deceitful change. The change should give us good roads. We want roads that will take us to our destination not to our untimely graves. We want good education for our children, food for everybody to eat, good medical care. The people of Nigeria must make sure that they get our politicians to respect us. We are too cheap. They buy us with cheap money and we then vote for the wrong people. Afterwards, suffering follows. There is a logic to the kind of suffering we are going through in Nigeria. We have not learnt to hold our politicians accountable. A politician comes, gives you N500 and says you must vote for him. Without bothering about his ideology, you vote for that person, now in a day or two, you spend your N500. But you have already voted out your future and the future of your children. I know this is happening because there is extensive poverty in our land. We must find a way of reducing poverty, alleviating it, in fact extirpating it. We can do it. Nigeria has enough resources to go round. We are one of the richest countries in the world; number 7 producer of petroleum. Go to Kuwait, go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai where everybody is going now, you will discover that they have done something with their oil money. Japan has no oil, has no natural resources but she is leading in electronics. We live on the ocean but we are washing our hands with saliva. The change we mean must be change from impunity. Those who rule us have to be accountable. In Nigeria, people behave anyhow. Criminals are not punished and that is why crimes keep multiplying. There must be rewards for good deeds and punishment for bad deeds. We are ruled by the people who steal our money and we allow them to stand on the pulpits in the church and make them imams in the Mosques. In this country today, it pays to do evil than to do good. That is why our country is in this way. But I know things can be better. We have to tell the politicians, change is what you promised sirs, where is the change? During the last election, there were two women on the queue waiting to cast their votes. They held their PVC in their hands. They are not university graduates or whatever. They said that they will use the voter’s cards in their hands to sweep off the government of thieves from power and if the incoming government doesn’t do well, they shall also use it to sweep them off. They told me something a professor of political science couldn’t have told me. That is democracy in the street. That is the kind of things we need in this country. The politicians are few and we are many. Every Nigerians must be interested in how much the legislators are earning. We have to know how much is the constituency allowances. We have to know what is called security vote that governors are collecting every month and how is it being spent. We spend over 60 percent of our earnings on the maintenance of parasitic and prodigal political officers and the rest of us are suffering. So as Fela will say, you are suffering and smiling. It is your fault. We have to ask question. Don’t delegate the asking of your questions to a few people like Agbakoba, and Falana, It is our duty to make sure that we are governed well. We are led and not ruled. Q; At what point did you pick interest in poetry? A: Right from the time I knew how to talk. I was surrounded by culture. My father was a farmer, but he was a musician at a side. My mother was a cloth weaver and as she wove, she sang. There were drums around, Egungun, Olosunta festival, Oloba festival, Sango festival and so on. I learnt from those things. Unfortunately, we are driving them away in the name of foreign religion. The religion we practice here is of the people of the Middle East. Why must we destroy what is ours? Yoruba culture is extremely accommodating. You can add all these together and still function. Until we rediscover our traditional culture, the best part of it, we are not likely going to make much progress in this part of the world. All that we are copying, we can never copy them well. The white people are laughing at us. A Nigerian leaves Nigeria to America to Christianize them. It was them who brought Christianity here in the first instance. You are now saying you don’t have Christianity again and I am going to give you more Christianity. They look at you and ask you about the country you are coming from. You told them you are coming from Nigeria, a country of corrupt politicians. You don’t only bless them in the church, you equally pray for them and call hell fire on their opponents. Jesus Christ didn’t do that, Prophet Mohammed didn’t do that, so, do it right. We could make this country better, there is no magic.