Warehouses Of Damaged Goods -By Ike Willie-Nwobu

A fortnight ago, the Plateau State High Court sitting in Jos sentenced one Emmanuel Ude to death by hanging for the 2021 killing of his secondary school teacher, Mr. Job Dashe. The incident had occurred at the Government Technical School Bukuru when the teacher confronted him over a breach of the dining room etiquette.

In sentencing, the judge pronounced that despite the Defendant’s plea for leniency, it was in the interest of justice for the law to take its course.

A few weeks ago, a set of Nigerian students concluded their Senior Secondary Certificate Examination. It marked the point of exit for many of them from secondary school. To celebrate this milestone in their young lives, many of them took to wild celebrations. When clips and pictures of their debauchery broke on social media, not a few commentators raised eyebrows at the content of the character of young people coming out of Nigeria’s secondary schools. These concerns were not at all baseless because for so long, it has appeared that the country will lose an entire generation to these vices.

As education in Nigeria has taken a nosedive, the colossal cost has not only been intellectual. In fact, the more damaging cost has come in terms of character formation. There is no doubt that beyond intellectual development, schools are places of character formation. Students are expected not just to learn about sciences and humanities but to imbibe priceless values like respect, decency, modesty, tolerance, civility and crucially, patriotism.
Unfortunately, as education has taken a backseat in Nigeria’s priorities with leaders preferring to endlessly chase wild geese, character formation has all but evaporated from Nigerian schools.

These days, with a chaotic country providing the backdrop, students in many secondary schools are cut loose to pursue nefarious goals. Cultism has become rife, as is the truancy, which is so deleterious to learning goals. With the authority of teachers increasingly subverted by students encouraged by an increasingly morally bankrupt society, teachers have become an endangered species.

Often caught in the crossfire of competing vices, teachers are often left to bear the brunt of society’s failures, but especially of parental failure in schools effectively turned into warehouses of damaged goods.

With many parents struggling to impose their authority and raise responsible children at home, schools have become dumping grounds for the worst damaged goods of parental failures.

These days, too many parents fail in the basic roles of parenting and because they fear the very beasts they have bred, they hurriedly ship them off to boarding schools where they threaten the lives of their overworked and underpaid teachers.

With the country’s underpaid and overworked teachers unfairly burdened with the impossible task of redeeming Nigeria’s tribe of rebellious teenage misfits and malcontents, many teachers are getting broken under a backbreaking assignment that is as unfair as it is unjustifiable and thankless.

In triumphant songs that have since turned to elegies, school assembly lines used to belt out stanzas about how children are the leaders of tomorrow. Today, Nigeria looks to its children and teenagers and is hit with the sobering reality that it has not future, as no country can have a future with the kind of hellions let loose in secondary schools every year.

It amounts to national deceit to continue to shirk a confrontation with the problems confronting the country’s young people. It is a conversation Nigeria can put off no longer. But the fear is that with hapless and helpless teachers cast into the firing line of moral decadence oozing out of its young, Nigeria is determined to avoid this conversation for longer, much to its peril.

Ike Willie-Nwobu,
Ikewilly9@gmail.com