The decision of President Muhammadu Buhari to travel to the United Kingdom for the Global Education Summit on Financing Global Partnership for Education (GPE) 2021-2025 perhaps offered him the opportunity to temporarily stay away from the cesspool of political morass and economic degradation his rulership has dragged the once potentially great but never realised Federal Republic of Nigeria into, to put it in proper perspective, he simply flew out of the sea of terror just to attend a summit he possibly did not know anything about.
For the first time in a very long while, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, spewed facts on Thursday while speaking in London when he posited that no human being can succeed outside his personal educational qualification. He even went further to add that ‘anyone who misses education has missed everything in life’. Now as self-indicting as the statement was, it was an unassailable truism as it clearly revealed to Nigerians why all their indices have remained negative since Buhari took over the mantle of leadership in the country. From the surface, it appears the President was poking the minds of Nigerians to ascertain what their expectation was from an intellectually docile individual like himself in the 21st century.
Read More: Buhari For Travelling To London For Virtual Meeting
The first major source of apprehension for many intellectually savvy Nigerians was why President Buhari or perhaps the ‘cabal’ that runs his maladministration chose to deploy the country’s scarce resources to travel to London when by the schedule and plan of the meeting could have been attended virtually. Yes! Bilateral meetings or not, the meeting didn’t require his presence physically, at least not the presence of a demystified small-minded bigot who expresses only intellectual vacuity at any given opportunity.
The more plausible reason why the President had to embark on such a needless trip was ostensibly to camouflage his private appointment with his doctors under the virtual summit apparently to launder his ‘consistent failure’ to honour his pre-2015 campaign promise not to embark on medical tourism if elected President – A promise which he has not only failed to keep but also spat on the faces of Nigerians. Promising his citizens to end medical tourism and then traveling to the UK for the same reasons for the 13th time is something only a morally deficient personality can fathom; all his actions since he became President have all been proponents of his patriotic opacity, and empty nationalism.
From every action the President has taken over the last six years, it is very easy to deduce that, just like a majority of Nigerians believe, the imp is not only wasteful but also thinks only about himself, and cares less about millions of our citizens, who do not have access to foreign medical treatment. That millions of Nigerians die avoidable deaths daily due to his maladministration’s lackadaisical attitude towards the health sector does not bother the gaunt-faced illiterate.
Under his watch and tutelage, Nigeria has continued to drift alarmingly and is now becoming a failed State as criminal Fulani herdsmen, bandits, unknown gunmen, terrorists, and kidnappers now roam the country daily, raping, maiming, burning, and abducting, and killing.
Threats of secession have magnified across the land owing to his maladministration. His actions have continued to give him away as a self-centered person just his ineptitude has continued to amplify every ill presently bedeviling Nigeria. His government has been characterised by extremely bad governance, unprecedented nepotism, sickening religious bias, ethnic triumphalism, and plain cluelessness
Please make no mistake about it, there is nothing wrong with attending a summit that seeks to discuss how to improve on Eduction, in fact, Education serves as a bedrock and hallmark to the development of any society. Lack of quality Education and unemployment would always naturally accumulate to a disastrous peak. To further buttress this, the consequences of this manifestation is the locus of the hydra-headed insecurity that is presently keeping Nigerians sleepless. It is the lack of Education, particularly in Northern Nigeria, that has given speedy rise to terrorism in Nigeria. The only reason terrorists can lure ignorant citizens to either cause them harm or conscript them into full-time terrorism is because of illiteracy which can only thrive where Education is despised. Nigeria as a nation, claims to be the giant of Africa but on the contrary, has continued to show its incompetence to the world with its failure in its leadership role in the continent by setting the right standards. It is not without doubt that the Nigerian government under Buhari has no idea or roadmap for the future, or how to confront unforeseen circumstances with the potentials to consume the country.
That said, it is pertinent to elucidate that the grouse of Nigerians is not with Education Summit itself but rather with the attendee himself – Muhammadu Buhari. The reasons are very visible even for the blind to see, for a President who has simply looked the other way while the Educational sector in Nigeria has continued to pace on to comatose over six years to attend an educational summit speaks of crass ineptitude.
Charity, they say begins at home, on the contrary, Buhari’s charity does not only begin in London but ends in London. On Thursday, while at the summit, Buhari ignorantly joined other world leaders to commit to a pledge to help raise $5 billion to support the Education sector in about 90 countries where 80 percent of the world’s out-of-school children live. This was not only stupid but ironically painful. How much has Buhari’s government appropriated to the almost collapsing Eduction in Nigeria in 6 years? At this point, it is important to inform the reader that Buhari’s Nigeria against the global 20 percent benchmark budgeted just 6.3 percent of its 2021 national budget on the Federal Ministry of Education. In numerical perspective, out of a ₦11.7 trillion budget, only the sum of ₦742 billion out of it was allowed to the ministry. To even make matters worse, out of that sum, ₦615.1 billion is proposed to go into the recurrent expenditure of the ministry which would be personnel and overhead costs while ₦127.3 billion is devoted to capital expenditure. For the lay reader, in 2021, Buhari plans to spend less than ₦127.3 billion to boost education in a country that is known to have one of the highest out-of-school children numbers in the world – less than $500 million which is less than the budget of some institutions in the US. How then can someone like Buhari be seen and even allowed to talk where financial support for education is being discussed?
The President’s decision to go to the UK has further revealed how heartless and bereft of conscience he is, how else can one explain why the Daura born Fulani nomad was more interested in going to London for a virtual education summit when hundreds of students, who ought to be beneficiaries of the meeting, are languishing in kidnappers’ dens, with his clueless administration taking no concrete steps to rescue them? It smacks of logic and common sense. Did Buhari going to London to discuss the education of people who may never be reunited with their poor parents if mouth-watering ransoms are not parted with? Of course the answer is apparent.
Again in a summit, it is common knowledge that during panel discussions or crucial debates, attendees are often required to talk, so a crucial mind would ask, what would Buhari be discussing or saying in a discussion with professors? What would a Secondary School Certificate holder whose certificate can’t even be found contribute in the midst of sound minds? Was he going to be deaf and dumb during the meeting? A famous Maurice Switzer quote states that; ‘It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a dumb idiot (paraphrased) than to talk and remove all doubt of it.’ What Buhari would simply do at this summit would be to remove all doubts.
A careful perusal of his background would bring his love for Boko Haram to the fore; his statements and actions and prior to becoming President are all on the public space. For the lay reader, Boko Haram means ‘Western Education Is A SIN’ Now, what would someone who tacitly supports a system that abhors modern Education be doing in an educational summit for goodness sake? Didn’t it occur to him that cows and Ruga would not be discussed there?
In conclusion, it is a shame that Nigeria is being represented at a Global Educational Summit by someone who is academically inactive. The plain truth is that Buhari is intellectually stagnant and has nothing to offer academically. Having him in that meeting is a disgrace to a supposedly giant of Africa. It would have been better if he simply went straight to see his doctors than to attend a summit that would do his country more disservice. His doctors need him more, they need to mentally examine him, its been a while.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
