TODAY in Nigeria everybody is aware of the hydra-headed monster called corruption, which is poised to swallow everything that is inherently good in us. We are also cognizant of the congenital link between corruption and the materialistic culture which pervades our current society. Right from the new born baby to the gray-haired granny, we are faced with a generation that places more value on the money in your pocket more than the wisdom in your eyes; a phenomenon which has the definite power to make us self-destruct.

As I thought about this last night, I was suddenly jolted into the sudden realisation that this is a fundamental issue that requires not only a social reorientation campaign across the general populace, but a deliberate inculcation of anti-materialistic and anti-corruption ideals into the education curriculum and instruction principles of Nigeria, right from the nursery to the university.

I think this is so because I came to the distinct conviction that, if not for the grace of God, I would have missed my calling, due to the experience I had in my secondary school days when one of my teachers almost ruined my young mind with some materialistic instructions and impartation.

The unfortunate event was during my first year in the senior level, when the students in my class were told to come out one after the other to make an oral presentation of “My Best Subject”. When it came to my turn, I walked to the front of the class, and among other things said that my best subject was History because I wanted to apply for Mass Communication in the JAMB exams in order to study journalism in the higher institution. As I said this, the teacher in charge of the exercise raised her hand and hushed me, and began to give the whole class a lecture on the choice of future career.

She told us that we should aspire to study courses that made meaning in the contemporary society. She said that journalism was not profitable financially; and as if to buttress her point, she looked at me – as I stood sheepishly in front of my fellow students – and asked me whether I knew if “journalists feed well?” (to translate the exact words she used in my native Igbo language). Needless to say, from that moment on, I began to reevaluate my earlier choice of journalism as a career.

And if not for sheer luck, which made me to come in contact with books and TV programmes on the journalistic career of the famous writer and journalist, Frederick Forsythe, and to discover that with much determination and talent, one can make it in the world as a journalist, I would have succumbed to the teacher’s ‘wisdom’ and taken my father’s preferred choice of discipline for me: law.

But my concern now is for other young students – past, present and future – who are not lucky enough like me, and ended up under the twisted tutelage of tutors who direct them to the wrong path of life.

This is fundamental because teachers have an extraordinary way of leaving lasting – sometimes eternal – impression on their wards, pupils and students. Granted, peers, colleagues and neighbours have a definite way of influencing and nurturing one’s character and personality by constantly molding one’s choices, tastes and proclivities; but teachers are almost ethereal in their impression and impact.

For example, the manner by which a biology teacher teaches the subject can make a student to hate the subject for ever, and therefore miss a career in medicine; likewise, the way another one imparts English language can make a student to become a linguist in the future. Give or take, a teacher will mold a child into the cast he or she will crystallize into in the future.

This is why Nigeria should make it a point of duty to take a second look at our education system and its teachers. The 6-3-3-4 System is a failure not only because the students are lacking in arithmetic and grammar, but because corruption and materialism have crept into that System. It is the teachers who persuade the rich students to ‘connect’ them with their rich and influential parents.

It is the teachers who encourage the students to pay for extra-mural lessons just because these teachers are the ones organising these private lessons, and so stop giving their best during the normal school hours in order to make up after school hours. It is the teachers who cajole the students to buy their text books – “never bother to read them; you are safe as long as you buy my own text book”. The most sublime aspect is that some teachers make careless statements, not knowing the import of it in the minds of these young ones. Let’s face it: Youths have what one American movie called ‘dangerous minds’.

In fact, I vividly remember when I was in the university, and one lecturer was teaching us during one of those episodes of biting fuel scarcity in the country. After lecturing for a while about ‘news reporting’, he flippantly commented that, anyway, it was more lucrative to be a petrol station attendant than to be a news reporter. The question is, with that side comment, what did Mr. Lecturer expect his students to do about the course he was trying so hard to impart? Did he want them to drop out of school and join the hustlers at the fuel stations? Or did he want them to devise more lucrative ways of surviving as reporters: demanding for brown envelopes, for example?
I think that the Federal Government should treat education in Nigeria as a total package. Whatever it takes let the decision makers and strategists devise enduring ways of rooting out corruption from Nigeria through the education sector. This is because great nations and empires of this world, past and present, depend on education to nurture every culture and political ideology they hope to inculcate in the masses and entrench in the life and destiny of the State in question.

The Egyptian, Greek and Roman empires; the old Soviet Union, China and the United States of America are classic examples. America, for instance, have done this through the strict indoctrination of the tenets of intellectual property, punishment of crimes against the State, respect for national symbols, the supremacy of the government, the importance of knowledge based initiatives, the freedom of citizens, and the manifest bright future of the nation. Therefore, if Nigeria really wants to root out corruption, let her dig into the foundations of the education system and pull hard, and watch the monster fall and die.

Mr. GREG ODOGWU, a commentator on national isues, writes from Abuja.