Last week I saw a post by Chinedu Junior Ihekwoaba on LinkedIn. In the piece, he talked about the biggest challenge facing Nigeria and concluded it was the youths. While I agree with him that one of the biggest challenges Nigeria faces is her youths. I disagree because I believe there’s a bigger challenge for Nigeria than her youths, a challenge that engulfs all her children, and that’s the orientation/mentality of Nigerians. 

 This was my comment on the post 

You’re right because the youths are part of Nigeria’s problem, but it’s not just the youths it’s the citizens (youth and elders) as a whole. Don’t forget the youths grew up learning from one or two persons around them and from their environment. What did they learn? What did their environment thought them, directly or indirectly?

Even our so called elders ain’t taking the back position. They are at the forefront of sowing discord, disunity, tribal chauvinism, ethnical jingoism and religious intolerance. It is just normal the youths follow their lead. Remember, the Yorubas say – Esin t’osiwaju ni t’eyin wo s’are (literally, the leading horse is what the the followers emulate in running style).

Also, another Yoruba proverb says – Agba kin wa l’oja ki ori omo tuntun wo. Literally, we can’t have an elder in a place and the infant (you can say youth) would misposition his head. In other words, some level of discipline is expected from the young ones who have elders around them.

The question now is, the Nigerian youths are fast becoming a menace to Nigeria, What role are the Nigerian elders playing to correct things?

Therefore, for me, Nigerians, both young and old, are the biggest problem Nigeria faces. Or should I say the destitute mentality and orientation of Nigerians is the biggest problem Nigeria is facing.

Now to my point about our orientation/mentality being our biggest challenge in Nigeria. Two quotes come to mind.

The first is that of Daniel Ally. It goes thus

To change your reality, you must change your mentality.

While the second is an Islamic quote and goes thus – 

There’s a part of the body, if it’s okay the whole body is okay. If it’s sick, the whole body is sick. It’s the mind.

You see we are who we think we are. What builds in our mind becomes our thoughts, our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our habits, and our habits become us – our personality, mentality and being. So if we must do the right thing we must start by doing so in our minds.

The mentality of the average Nigerian sucks and stinks, and that’s why we are where we are – internet fraud and taking undue advantage of people (thinking we’re smart) but to mention a few.  How do we explain some of the happenings that occurred in our political sphere (the 8th Assembly comes to mind)? How do we explain the support some of us gave to a presidential aspirant that happily boasted he’s contesting to enrich his friends with the country’s assets? How do we explain the celebration of people convicted for stealing our wealth upon their return from jail? How do we explain security agents’ connivance with the same criminals? But to mention a few.

Now what must we do moving forward?

The government needs to declare a state of emergency on what has now become a destitute orientation/mentality of her citizens. The National Orientation Agency needs to be revitalized and gets her tooth re-sharpened, and be swung into full action. The draft/template that has been designed to shape our orientation needs to be revisited and perhaps redesigned. If need be volunteers can be recruited to help breathe life once again into the offices of the agency, in all the local government areas in Nigeria.

Also, Nigerians who are fortunate to be blessed with brain and sanity should never shy from educating and enlightening those around them who fall short.

I know the fight to resuscitate Nigeria will be a tough one, but it must be done, and it can be done, because if it is not done we are done. GOD Bless Nigeria.

During my primary school days, the Igbo people were seen as those that love money and wouldn’t go to school because they wanted to make money quickly. Then, the Igbos were accused of sending their young sons away to serve as ‘boy’ (apprentice) to traders and marry out their daughters at tender age. Their sons will ‘graduate’ from their apprenticeship when their mates were still struggling with their secondary school education and their daughters will be grandmothers as their age mates were graduating from the university (I remember a woman that was in the same class with her daughter in UNIZIK).

Let me be honest with you, we that were in school used to envy these boys then. You know why, we were always broke while they had money to throw about. But then, we had something they cherish – education (or should I say ‘literacy’ because they too had a form of education). Anyway, some of them had to find their way into the university because they want to have what we had (then there were so many Onitsha traders in UNIZIK weekend Continuous Education Programme (CEP)).

Anyway those days had long gone. Today, the literacy level of the Igbos has shown that the story has turn around for the good. An analysis of state-by-state literacy level presented by The Guardian of 24 July, 2017, shows that the state with the highest literacy level in the country is Imo State, with 96.43%. Other Eastern States came as follows: Abia – 94.24%, Anambra – 92.11%, Enugu – 89.46% and Ebonyi – 77.76%. The same newspaper showed that in 2016, Abia State was the best state in WAEC, and Anambra State took the second position.

The above analysis shows that the Igbos really worked on themselves to achieve these feats. My interest today is not on how the state governments worked on the education sector to achieve their aims (because they actually did). My interest is on how the change in the mindset and attitudes of the individuals led to Ndi Igbo being counted among the literates.

1. Culture: The Igbo people believe that “Ofu onye adi azu nwa” (one person cannot raise a child). They are ready to let others help them raise their children. One of the places to find such helpers is the school. In fact, when a mother is having challenges raising an obstinate child, the advice everybody will give her is, “Send him to school so that the teachers can help you to train him very well”.

In Igbo land, teachers are seen as ‘formators’ and disciplinarians (that is why they are called ‘ony nkuzi’ – the person that shapes things well). And every parent wants to have an obedient and socially accepted child. So, the natural thing to do around here is to send your child to school so that he or she will be ‘well trained’.

2. Quest for Knowledge: That is just a simple truth. Every Igbo man wants to know what you know. This is why you hear parents saying things like, “I want to send him to a good school where they will teach him very well.” These people don’t mind whatever it takes to achieve this so long as their children find the best place to acquire knowledge that will pull them through life.

3. Respect for the Educated Rich: If you are educated but you are not rich, you will have your respect. If you are rich but you can’t read and write, one day a small boy will point it out to you that you are an illiterate (ask those that go to umunna meetings). But when you are educated and rich, you are the bomb.

People always say that Igbo people love money. But I am here to tell you that Igbo people love people that are rich and well educated. Do you know what it means to be a professor or a medical doctor and that you can travel out of the country at will? Just ask around and you will understand.

So everybody wants to be educated and rich.

4. Increase in the Number of Working Mothers: Igbo working mothers are increasing by the day. Most of them do not feel comfortable leaving their babies with nannies. So they take them to crèches when they were still tender. This is also seen in villages where mothers send their children to school immediately they wean them. To them, the children should go to school where they will be safe while their mothers run around for their jobs and businesses.

5. Attitude towards the English Language: Ability to speak English places one among the elites in Igbo land. In fact, when you start speaking English, people will keep quiet to listen to you. And you know that you can’t learn English unless you go to school.

6. Wide Travelling: The Igbo people are known to travel far and wide. They need to be able to interact with the people they meet in their host communities. And Nigeria being a multilingual nation means that either these travellers learn the over 400 Nigerian indigenous languages, or learn the English language that links all of them. So, they go for the best option – English. The thing about learning this language is that it comes with the ability to develop its four skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing.

7. The Media Campaign: There is no way I can drop this piece without acknowledging the efforts of the media. I could remember that different television and radio programmes were aired on NTA Enugu to discourage school dropouts. Then, the usual advice was, “At least let them write their WAEC first before going for business or getting married”. I could remember that some people believed that anybody that has finished secondary school is too old to be an apprentice or get married (at least in Awkuzu girls were expected to marry while in SS 1). But gradually, our girls started getting married after secondary school and the boys started ‘learning’ trade when they are done with their WAEC. This shows that the campaigns of the media worked a lot on the psyche of a lot of parents and individuals, who found reasons to send the younger ones to school.

In as much as I celebrate the high literacy rates of the Igbo communities, I believe that all works have not yet been done. The percentage of literates is not up to 100% so we shouldn’t celebrate much yet. We need to work on those in the rural areas where the major number of illiterates can be found.

However, as we Igbos continue to work on ourselves, I enjoin other states that registered high rate of illiteracy to emulate these Igbo communities so as to help their people.