NHEF News
06-26-2009
:: Ezekwesili wants focus on education, decries illicit wealth
From Laolu Akande, New York Originally published in the Guardian on June 26, 2009
WORLD Bank Vice President for Africa, Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, has called on Nigerian professionals at home and abroad not to sit by and watch what she described as "denigration of Nigeria's intellectual capital in exchange for the illicit acquisition of wealth by a deprived elite class of the society."
Ezekwesili, former Education and Solid Minerals Minister under the Obasanjo administration, spoke on Wednesday evening in New York at a dinner where she received the inaugural award from the United States-based Nigerian Higher Education Foundation (NHEF), alongside other honorees including Prof. Wole Soyinka, U.S. Congressman, Donald Payne and African-American business leader, Rosa Whitaker.
Soyinka and Payne were absent, but Ezekwesili roused the audience with her acceptance speech, which attacked the celebration of mediocrity and illicit wealth in Nigeria and Africa, condemning what she called the "ignoble, despicable and contemptible acquisition of illicit wealth" taking place in Nigeria and in Africa at large.
Her audience comprised top Nigerian diplomats, doctors, lawyers and educationists, including the country's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Prof. Joy Ogwu, Dr. Fatimah Gambari, wife of the UN Special Envoy, and former Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Minister Nasir El Rufai.
Members and leaders of the NHEF based in the U.S. and present at the dinner on Wednesday night in New York included Dr. Sola and Mrs. Funmi Olopade, Chicago-based doctors and scholars, Dr. Yarromi Bassey and Beatrice Hamza Bassey and a lawyer described by Ezekwesili in her speech as "an epitome of greatness," being one of the youngest owners/ partners in a prominent law firm in the U.S., Dr. Ola O. Akinboboye.
The former Education Minister said: "If Africa had followed the path of celebrating knowledge, recognising that the substance of man or woman is not in what they owned but who they are... if we had that, the outcome would have been great."
On the contrary she lamented in a short but spirited speech that "military adventurism led Nigeria and other African countries to the celebration of the "hewers of wood and drawers of water, beggars riding horses and princes walking."
Calling for the badly needed application of Nigeria's brain power, especially from Nigerian professionals abroad for the purposes of Nigeria's development, Ezekwesili, who was awarded the Foundation's inaugural Jonathan F. Fenton Leadership in Education Award, expressed an 'urgency of now,' paraphrasing a line recently made famous by U.S. President Barack Obama during his presidential campaigns last year.
According to her, "we can't sit back and watch the intellectual capital of Africa, especially of Nigeria to be denigrated, we must reconnect all the brain power in this room back to Nigeria ... thinking through the analytical solutions to our problems; enough of anecdotal solutions."
Describing many African countries as societies where the concept of the elite has been put to denigration, the World Bank Vice President said the continent "needs incredible investment in higher education.
However, she had commendable words for Burkina Faso and Tanzania where she noted some progress in education lately.
The former Nigerian Education Minister, who was also nicknamed 'Madam Due Process,' said it was in the context of intellectual capital "that development happens."
According to her, there is nothing more important than investing in education, adding that "the anti-intellectual approach to the problems in Africa," is a bane in the continent's development.
She recalled that as Education Minister, she stated repeatedly that without education, a country's population is "absolutely a liability," drawing a parallel with Singapore which is not blessed like Nigeria with natural resources, but regards its people as its best resource because of education.
The NHEF, which gave the awards, is an independent non-governmental organisation launched by several Nigerian doctors and lawyers in the U.S.-who trained in Nigeria-with the support of the Mac Arthur Foundation to raise funds for a number of Nigerian federal universities.