been able, over the years to manipulate himself into positions of
power against the will of the people, in saner climes, would he have
been a Council Area Chairman? Let Mark and all other government
officials, whose kernels have been cracked by benevolent spirits(Dear
old Chinua Achebe!), shoot their mouths, after all, the mouths with
which they shoot are theirs, the best thing is to ignore them. So much
for David Mark and co.
A greater part of the blame lies on those "book people", who would not
hesistate to carry the briefcases of these power usurpers, as long as
the paycheque is fat. Whenever I see these shameless "book people",
grovel before supposedly semi-literate politicians and
"Militaricians", ostensibly in the name of service to fatherland, but
in actual fact, to earn a living, my respect wanes considerably.
Chidi Anthony Opara
"Some criticisms are inverted admiration"
On Jul 26, 8:05 pm, "Anunoby, Ogugua" <Anuno...@lincolnu.edu> wrote:
> "Expertise. Every country needs it. Some countries cultivate and nurture it; others denigrate and shame it. Expertise used to be revered in Nigeria. Today, the learned and the informed are scorned as textbookish idealists who, in spite of their mastery over their subject areas, are unschooled in the ways of Nigerian life. This disdain for book people, for competence and intellectual capital has crept into our politics. That's the arena in which it's doing the most damage to our country."
>
> MO
>
> The above statements are true. They would have been more true I believe, if MO had asked and answered the questions: what expertise? Expertise for what?
> A veiled point that MO makes is that Nigeria has changed. She has indeed. Some Forum participants may remember that the current President of Nigeria's Senate was widely reported to have condemned university education. He was also quoted as saying that military education is always preferable to university education and that he would always choose military training over university education, even for his children. So long as such a man is Nigeria's Senate President, for so long will any expectation and hope that learned structured, applicable knowledge will be brought to bear on the work of the Senate, and consequently Nigeria, be misplaced and forlorn respectively.
> Nigeria has survived so far without much serious planning, or other premeditated thought to apply learned ideas in statecraft. What is the place of budgets in public governance in Nigeria for example? Nigeria's college educated, have gladly and willingly indentured themselves to the service of largely ignorant and "uneducated" crooks, and other criminals. Nigeria has so regressed today that a political science or law professor begs and bribes to the publicity secretary of an inconsequential and obscure political group. It is called "Daily Bread Politics". Nigeria's educated classes are routinely used to legitimize the fraud and crimes of political upstarts. The experience has been that "expertise" can be traded for a "mess of porridge".
> MO must have noticed that the largely uninformed and ill-informed political masters of Nigeria have themselves become experts without the necessary hard work that learning and the acquisition of expertise demands and entails. How else does one explain that career coup plotters and subversives have themselves metamorphosis into democrats at the drop of a hat, and seem to have been accepted as such? Babangida; Buhari; David Mark; Obasanjo; Democrats? Only in Nigeria.
> What seems to have happened in Nigeria it seems to me, is that expertise is still useful but the species' of relevant expertise is not the one that helps to build achieving and progressive societies. This is sad but I believe true.
>
> oa
> _______________________________________
> From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu [meoch...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 7:39 AM
> To: USAAfricaDialogue
> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Anti-Intellectualism and Book People
>
> Anti-intellectualism and Book People
>
> by Moses Ochonu
>
> Expertise. Every country needs it. Some countries cultivate and nurture it; others denigrate and shame it. Expertise used to be revered in Nigeria. Today, the learned and the informed are scorned as textbookish idealists who, in spite of their mastery over their subject areas, are unschooled in the ways of Nigerian life. This disdain for book people, for competence and intellectual capital has crept into our politics. That's the arena in which it's doing the most damage to our country.
>
> Our countrymen are prone to amnesia. Some of it is self-cushioning, willful forgetting, some of it an expression of the national malaise of shortsightedness. We seem to have forgotten the time when people who knew what they were talking about were encouraged to talk about it. Our national attitudinal distortion is a function of this failure to remember when our values were different and when those values defined how we conducted personal and public affairs. One of those values used to be the pursuit and expression of knowledge and expertise.
>
> The elevation of quackery and street smartness to high national arts makes it hard for some Nigerians to imagine a time when we valued their opposite: the mastery of a knowledge area or technical subject. But it doesn't take a distant excursion into our history to get to a recent past in which learning, expertise, and knowledge were the gold standards at all levels of our life. There were those who breached this national ethos of course. But back then, knowledge possession was its own reward, a magnet for admiration and a source of inspiration.
>
> Knowledge used to be celebrated, if not always put to use, from top down and vice versa. Its acquisition and the access and importance that it conferred dominated the counsel of parents and guardians to their wards. Pep talks in other social settings venerated people of expertise and projected them to young Nigerians as models of accomplishment and heroism.
>
> Men of intellect, unique qualification, and expertise were widely consulted for their superior insights. They were sought out to comment on burning national issues in their areas of expertise. They were prodded to intervene in policy debates that fell within their intellectual province. Their competence and jurisdiction over matters of public good gave them a social and intellectual capital that entitled them to reverence and moral authority.
>
> Remember when Professor Chike Obi, the famed late mathematician, was consulted for an expert opinion on the question of what constitutes two third of votes in two third of states during the 1983 elections? This was standard practice when Nigeria, though sliding, still valued expertise and book knowledge.
>
> Placed in the same situation, today's politicians would, far from seeking the verdict of an expert, transform into overnight mathematical geniuses and proclaim with authoritarian fervor what they believe the constitutional criteria on two third means. Their self-serving declaration would subsume and override the opinion of any professional mathematician, no matter how learned, no matter how grounded in the settled logics of the field.
>
> Another solution to a numerical quagmire in today's politics would be a peculiarly Nigerian and PDP invention called "political solution." It is a political consensus usually consummated by quid pro quo accords, bribery, the active fear of class suicide or all three. It is applied when the constitution is observed in breach or when a political event fails the constitutional muster. Extra-constitutional interpretations and compromised opinions are summoned to supplant the informed opinion and advice of actual experts.
>
> Sometimes the goal is to put the issue beyond the intervention of experts, to deny the experts a say on the matter. Political events are manipulated and controlled to yield predetermined outcomes and to preempt ambiguities that may call for the intervention of experts. This last method alienates expertise and enthrones mediocrity. With the other methods, politicians impersonate experts or disregard their informed opinions. Here, they avoid having to seek out informed pronouncement, shutting out the book people altogether.
>
> Unlike the know-all, conceited politicians of today, yesterday's politicians respected experts and craved their pronouncements over difficult national issues. It's not that they enjoyed doing so or implemented expert recommendations consistently. But they had to seek out experts because society still regarded the talented and the trained as consultants of first and last resorts and enforced on politicians the modesty of recognizing where their knowledge ended and that of trained personnel began.
>
> There was still some value to being a trained, knowledgeable formal or informal consultant on certain specialized matters. Some of the politicians themselves, unlike today's flaky public officials, had been experts—proud experts—in various learned vocations and fields and had parlayed the prestige of their professional and intellectual accomplishments into political ascendancy. Their residual respect for book knowledge therefore moderated their disdain for the idealism and technical expertise of book people. It was also in their own self-interest as men of expertise who found themselves in politics to demonstrate the importance of knowledge to policy formulation and political decision-making. Their patronage of experts boosted them and added luster to their own political standing among their less intellectual peers.
>
> Then something shifted in our national mores. The tectonic shift was mostly political; perhaps it was a deeper moral shift that merely manifested first in the realm of politics. No matter, the shift has erased the relevance of experts in our national life. Today's experts and intellectuals are called dreamy-eyed idealists who live in the unrealistic worlds created by their own textbooks, unable to grasp or participate in the morally perverted world of Nigerian political and economic transactions. Now normalized as the realistic alternative to the Utopia of book people, this is a world in which there are few rules and moral restraints; it's a world in which street smarts trump reason and intellect.
>
> We have a national assembly today that rarely if ever calls expert witnesses to factually and intellectually foreground its hearings on key national policy issues. Even technical and esoteric committee hearings rarely patronize the expertise of those trained in the technical area. They prefer the cacophonous deliberations of uninformed legislators whose only point of reference is how much money is at stake in a particular bill.
>
> When experts are called, it is usually for show. Their advice is discarded ...
>
> read more »
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