Dear Prof. Fagbulu:
I concur with your efforts to infuse sensibility to the discussion of education in Nigeria. I want to contribute my personal observations. When I visited the home of the Nigerian ambassador to the United States in Virginia in the 90s he was the chairman of the Manufacturer Association of Nigeria I don't remember his name he was appointed by Gen Abacha he was reading a major Arabic newspaper in Arabic. Fortunately this ambassador was able to read English and Arabic texts and also Hausa in Ajami I imagined. I started thinking about my own educational development in Kwara which I started in Arabic in the Islamic school when I went to missionary school I was forced to lose my knowledge of Islamic and Arabic knowledge which I had before I was ten.When I was young I finished the Quran before my tenth birthday and I even graduated from Islamic school which was the common thing to do in my community. At the Anglican school which I attended in Jos there was no classes in the national languages of Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo and other Nigerian languages like Birom, Angas, Tarok, Idoma, Tiv, of which Benue Plateau had many. If we had such classes I would have chosen Igbo a language which now appeals to my academic and personal interest. You can imagine there was no support for the development of Arabic language in our secondary school. As a result I am now in illiterate in Arabic now because of the primary focus on the English language fortunately for me I can read and write in both Yoruba and Hausa but I will a lot of difficulties reading or writing Yoruba in Ajami of which there are abundant texts in Kwara State. I am totally lost now when my friends and childhood peers use Quranic verses to support their arguments in their discussions. I am now forced to teach myself Arabic and Qur'an so that I can understand my people and gain acceptance as an educated person in my community. An educated person in my community must know and master Yoruba, some Hausa, Arabic,and Islamic knowledge and English while I mastered Yoruba, Hausa, and English my Islamic knowledge and Arabic are limited,
Recently I was asking my students to define who was literate or illiterate, my students responded that if you can read English then you were literate but if you can read Hausa in Ajami you were illiterate. Most Nigerian scholars on this forum don't know that Arabic letters which was used to write in Hausa, Kanuri, Igala, Yoruba, Nupe, Ajami was used to write Hausa on the Nigerian currency which most older Hausa Muslims could read. Our education also did not prepare us to interact and communicate with the diverse nationalities in Nigeria, It is time to design a new curriculum which addresses the reality on the ground instead of education designed to produce a European with a black skin which have failed woefully.
All of this is affecting our discussions of religion in Nigeria most Christian scholars or lay people cannot intellectually discuss basic tenets of Islam or what Muslims believe even when they live intimately with Muslims. During the early days during the early history of Islam it was Christian scholars who contributed to the critical debates and understanding of Islam through intellectual debates about the religion while that traditions continues today in the United States and United Kingdom. University of Ibadan used to be the leading center of Arabic under the leadership Professor Dike now while Arabic is still developed in some Nigerian universities scholars have not used their intellectual capacities to contribute to the contemporary debates in Nigeria. It will would be nice if we have Nigerian Christians who are scholars of the religion of Islam leading the debates to inform the Nigerian public like followers of African Traditional Religion,Christians, and Muslims. The massive failures and problems with the educational institutions calls for an educational curriculum which solves the problem of our people. Culture is the basis of innovation it is time to return to the source to use our national languages as the basis for revolutionary changes in education this policy will transform our education sector and reduce brain drain as our educated people will use their education to develop our national culture. Thank you.
Villager
On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 5:43 PM, Amiel Fagbulu <amiel.fagbulu@ymail.com> wrote:
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