Opinion

Endangering 21st Century Nigeria’s Educational Institutions

Published

3 years ago

July 22, 2021

NewTimes

BOOK REVIEW: Ayo Joan Olatoyosi's Thesis, Antithesis And Synthesis Of Life

By
Grace Ego Omoni

Education is the bedrock of a nation’s development. It is the process of facilitating knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits in the individual. In other words, it is the act of acquiring or imparting knowledge or developing the powers of reasoning and judgement and preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life. According to Ebenuah- Okoh E.E., educational institutions all over the world are established to bring about positive changes in the lives of individuals. Thus, the education sector ought to be given more attention in that it gives room for the entire development of the nation and its citizens. According to Peretomode V., the utmost concern of educationists is the creation of products that are capable of eliciting desirable behaviour emotionally, intellectually, morally and socially.

Unfortunately, the standard so desired has proved to be counter-productive due to cancerous practices that have besieged the educational system. It is an undisputable fact that only a sound functional education system can guarantee this nation’s victory over the moral decadence that has so permeated the society. However, it is most disheartening that the educational system which the nation is looking up to for this change has completely failed. It is now the seat and domain of counter-productive practices negating the goals and objectives of education as stipulated in the National Policy on Education. Some of these goals include developing individuals to understand and appreciate their environment, and the acquisition of skills that will enable them to be self-reliant and be integrated into the society.

Education is very important and as such should not be neglected since the future of the nation is dependent on it. Despite the laudable goals and objectives as outlined in the NPE(2004), our educational institutions have failed to achieve these due to corrupt practices among policymakers, implementors of the policies, the learners and other stakeholders such as parents, politicians, the government, administrators and non-governmental organisations.

This article will identify some of these cancerous or counter-productive practices with a view to proffering solutions.
Counter-productive Practices:

Poor Funding: One of the major causes of failure in our educational institutions is poor funding. The financial crises that have engulfed the nation’s economy have made it impossible for the educational institutions to record any substantial progress. Before now, the education sector used to have the highest budget allocation in the nation but this is no longer so. The percentage margin between education and other sectors is now very minimal because the government does not cherish it as a priority to the nation. This has affected the institutions in terms of facilities, physical structures like blocks of classrooms, laboratories and the equipment therein, teaching aids, adequate and qualitative staff strength, training and retraining of teachers, remuneration for staff, e-libraries, health facilities and a host of other infrastructures.

Adequate and qualitative staff ensure that knowledgeable teachers are being enlisted, developed and rewarded for realizing the goals and objectives of education. However, poor staffing results in the pitiable outcomes which we see in the teaching-learning process. Moreover, most of the money put aside for the purpose of promoting education is being vandalized and embezzled by known and unknown unscrupulous elements in the society.

You can imagine that in this 21st century, teachers in schools including higher institutions are still in the practice of using blackboard and chalk to teach whereas, many private universities use the interactive digital board. What a shame! With this modern interactive board, the teacher can access the internet for useful information in relation to the topic, thus making the teaching much more interesting to the learner and easier for the teacher to explain. Thus, poor funding is counter-productive.

.Politicization of education. This is a very serious malpractice negatively affecting education in Nigeria. The government of the day has politicized educational policies affecting our institutions in the area of curriculum development, the establishment of schools and higher institutions of learning, posting of teachers, choice of subjects by the students, and appointments and promotions . Where do I start from? In appointments and promotions, a lot of lobbying goes on and at the end of the day, square pegs are put in round holes and vice-versa. Junior teachers are promoted over seniors and the unqualified are given appointments over the qualified creating disharmony in the system. Invariably, interest in the work becomes a problem and at the end of the day, the products cannot fit into the society as well-groomed individuals.

One more thing here is the issue of choice of subjects and the availability of qualified teachers. Take for instance French Language being paired with Arabic Language. It is a well-known fact that there is a dearth of French teachers in secondary schools. Deliberately, the so-called policymakers paired it with Arabic Language and flooded the schools with Arabic teachers. Who does not know that the intention is to give precedence to Arabic Studies and no choice for the students?

Another problem is in the area of posting teachers to urban schools leaving the rural areas to be starved of teachers in the core subjects. The school’s management board connives with teachers to have them posted to schools of their choice to the detriment of the rural ones. Even with that, proper supervision is not given to ensure that there is equitable distribution. This is cancerous.

Administrative Malpractices:

The impact of poor administration by both academic and non-academic staff in educational institutions is another counter-productive factor. There have been cases of deliberate missing files and documents causing delays in executing matters of importance in the schools. Others include delay in processing applications, late coming and irregularity to work, lack of dedication, dereliction of duties, falsification of documents, bribery and corruption and several other fraudulent practices that have tarnished the image and reputation of the education industry in Nigeria and have rendered institutions incapable of adequately meeting the goals and objectives of education.

Other examples include teachers and lecturers not strictly following the scheduled school timetable because they engage in private businesses to the detriment of the students. Often, they wait till the tail end of the term or semester to rush in teaching what would have taken them 13 weeks for those in the secondary schools and 16 weeks for higher institutions in just a few days. According to Prof Okoye, many lecturers and teachers exploit the students sexually and financially. They are forced to buy textbooks written by them for scores in continuous assessment. Some others fail the students for the refusal of their sexual or monetary demands or household equipment like Plasma television, washing machine, air conditioner and clothes. The more expensive the gift, the higher the score or grade.

Examination Malpractices: These occur at both external and internal examinations in a well-coordinated manner with so many people involved. Examination malpractice is a fraudulent means of cheating by getting answers to questions while an examination is going on. There are different types of examination malpractice. It could be by a sole individual or could be corporately organized. The school or the teachers or parents, supervisors, invigilators and the police are usually accomplices especially if the examination is external. It could be by bringing relevant materials into the examination hall or by impersonation whereby a person paid comes in to write for another individual. There was a case some years back when a friend of mine went to supervise WAEC only to find her friend’s son who had already passed the school certificate examination comfortably seated to write for someone. Immediately he sighted this friend of mine, he vanished from the hall.

There was another case in which a councillor in a local government was caught in the exam hall with relevant answer materials. He quickly threw the papers into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. The invigilator no longer had evidence to present. Some write on their palms, on the desks or under the hem of their garments. There was another case involving the police and the WAEC candidates during the time of Mrs Ogbuagu, the then Commissioner of Education in Delta. After these two boys were caught, two police officers were asked to take them to the police station. On their way, they bribed the police officers who returned to the exam centre to announce that the boys jumped into the river when they got to a bridge.

Other forms of examination malpractice include the leakage of examination questions in both external and internal situations, cases of missing scores, allowing students and non-teaching staff to be invigilators and collate and compile results and arranging for students to write exams outside the official time. Mass promotion too was another form of malpractice in those days. Here, students and pupils were allowed to move to the next class whether they passed or not. A few schools still do it, especially in the private sector.

All these are counter-productive practices that have lowered the standard of education and encouraged a high level of indiscipline. So most often, the certificates being carried about are not the true representation of the carrier’s intellectual ability! It is extremely dangerous. Many have used it to get employment and are not able to perform well. Employers give reports of ugly situations involving people who have wonderful educational qualifications they are not able to defend.

Admission, Appointment and Promotion Malpractices.
Educational institutions have laid down admission, appointment and promotion policies but these are most of the time set aside because of corruption tendencies. Let us look at the admission policy for primary school children. The law says the child must be six years old before he or she should be admitted but it is not so today. Children of 4 years or less than are found in primary one, especially in the private sector. The child may at times may be given double promotion and so skips classes, get to the secondary school and even write junior school certificate in J s s two and then off to the tertiary institution. Unable to cope, he or she begins to express emotional anxiety, depression and might fall into bad peer group.

This is all because the child was not ready emotionally, intellectually and physically. E.L.Thorndike in his educational laws of readiness said that the child must be ready intellectually, physically and emotionally. Some may drop out of school. UNICEF asserts that Nigeria has the highest number of school dropouts in the world having about 10.5 million of them out of school. Others engage in social vices such as cultism, hooliganism, indiscipline, alcohol and drug abuse, prostitution, inappropriate dressing and the use of foul language.

In tertiary institutions, we also have cases of illegal admissions. Hence you find some students being asked to withdraw after spending years due to fraudulent practice of getting admission.

Appointment and promotion fraudulent practice has caused problems in the school system leading to cases of indiscipline. Through lobbying junior teachers are promoted over the senior ones. In giving appointments, the unqualified get the job while the qualified is dropped. The result is inefficiency and deficient teaching due to limited knowledge. There was this teacher of French who taught French using English. Laughable you may say but this is one of the things endangering education in Nigeria. These have further heightened the level of illiteracy in the country.

Only sound qualitative education in a sane environment can guarantee our national development in Nigeria. The challenge, therefore, is to rebuild our educational system and free it from all forms of counter-productive practices. The government, the very educational institutions, academic and non non-academic staff, learners, parents and other stakeholders must be ready to engage in the following:

1) Funding of education should be the priority of the government at the federal, state and local levels. Schools need to be refurbished, rehabilitated, and rebuilt. Facilities such as blocks of classrooms, halls, health clinics, laboratories, science and technological equipment, e-libraries, textbooks, modern teaching aids, interactive digital boards and conducive classrooms must be made available in both the rural and urban schools.

2) Training and retraining of teachers, adequate staffing and fully qualified teachers properly distributed in both rural and urban areas must be put in place. Self-development following the policies laid down such as study leave with or without pay should be implemented. Reward and remuneration for hard work should be used to encourage teachers. Teachers teaching English Language, Mathematics and other science subjects should be given responsibility allowance. Promotion of teachers as at when due should be strictly followed. Denounce all forms of lobbying during promotion and appointment exercises.

3) The government and educational bodies should desist from politicizing education in Nigeria. Every ethnic or religious group should be given fair opportunity to education. Government should stop giving preference to a particular religion by making provisions for students to have extensive subject choices.

4)Admission policies should be strictly adhered to and enforced by the Ministry of Education. Proper supervision to checkmate these admission discrepancies at the primary, secondary school and tertiary levels is necessary especially for underage individuals.

5) Workshops and seminars should be organised for teachers to intimate them on new methods of teachings and approaches to teaching-learning situations.

6)Parents and guardians should be sensitized to government policies concerning education and their children. Parenting style that would bring out the best in their children should be introduced to parents. Authoritarian and laissez-faire kind of child-rearing practices should be discouraged.

7) Counselling and youth centres in the primary and secondary schools, as well as higher institutions, must be established so that students will have access to counselling activities from qualified personnel. Here they are taught the values of integrity, hard work and the dignity of labour.

8) The law on examination malpractice enacted years ago should be enforced. The law states that anyone guilty of examination malpractice should be sentenced to 21 years imprisonment. Surprisingly, this law is no longer in operation since its promulgation yet stories of examination malpractice abound everywhere.

9) Individuals without teacher education qualifications should be relieved of their appointment. Such should not be allowed to teach because they lack the pedagogical competence to do so.

10)Research and development of teachers is a veritable tool for educational growth and sustenance. The government and employers of teachers should encourage and sponsor them to learn more about new methods of teaching, the use of modern teaching aids and current issues in their subject areas.

11) Worship of academic certificates should be minimized. Award of certificate to undeserved individuals should be deemphasized. Emphasis should be placed on technologically inclined subjects and skills acquisition centres are to be built where students can learn trades.

12) Moral instructions should return to schools. The government of the day should ensure that learners have access to religious knowledge. It has been observed that the so-called repentant Boko Haram men, herdsmen, bandits and terrorists are not given any Christian Religious knowledge and this is not good enough. Again with the high rate of hooliganism, cultism, indiscipline, inappropriate dressing, Yahoo syndrome, kidnapping and armed robbery cases, moral instruction has become inevitable.

13) Parents – Teacher communication is important. There is need for teachers, parents, guardians, and others to periodically hold meetings to discuss the welfare of their children in terms of a conducive enabling environment, mental health, availability of materials and physical facilities needed to promote education. Schools should periodically organise open day for parents to come to see how their children are faring academically, socially and morally. With Parents- Teachers Association meetings, attendees will have opportunities to make suggestions that will be used to improve the educational standard.

14) Administrators should live up to expectation and should desist from practices such as lateness, irregular school attendance, bribery and corruption, engaging in pranks such as hiding files, delaying applications and stealing official materials. Such culprits should be punished.

Educational or counter-productive or cancerous practices are not peculiar to our nation Nigeria. Hong Kong and the USA are involved in this negative game. It is a malignant disease plaguing and endangering the educational system. It has made national development static and retrogressive. They are actions and inactions of individuals which violate the established ethical codes and conducts of educational institutions and policies. Parents, learners, the government, policymakers, implementors of the policies, administrators, academic, non-academic and management staff are all involved in the different shades of practices that are not productive. Therefore, it is suggested that all stakeholders involved should endeavour to have a new mindset and engage in activities that will make education productive.

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Opinion

Kemi Badenoch’s Bad Knocks On Nigeria

Published

2 hours ago

December 23, 2024

NewTimes

By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha

One of the interesting proverbs I picked up in our General African Studies (GAS 201) course with the late Professor Jabez Olowo Ojoade in the University of Jos in 1979 was ‘it is a bastard child that points at his homestead with his left hand! The Akan people of Ghana put it this way: a bastard child points to his father’s house with his left hand’. The Yoruba say that ‘a person who points to their homestead with the left hand is not a good person’, while the Luhya of Kenya say that ‘when pointing to your village, use your right hand’. It is in the Swahili language that a sort of generalised use of the left hand is concretised when it says ‘the left hand is for personal hygiene, not for pointing!

Bastard child! Homestead! Pointing with the left hand! These three constituents and functional parts of the proverb tickled my teenage imagination to no end. What is it about the left had that it should not be used to refer to one’s family? Why is this metaphor common across the continent? Indeed, there must be something about the family, about the homestead, about one’s origins that deserves respect no matter the circumstances.

By the way, some Nigerians in the diaspora also point to Nigeria with their left hand. ‘That country’, is often used to describe the place where some spent eighteen or thirty of their lives as they tried to find their feet. So, in a sense, Kemi is simply doing what some full-blooded Nigerians do in reaction to the anomie which currently rules the land. Kemi stands out because of her delicate and prominent position in the world. We all took offence when Bully Donald Trump referred to ours as ‘shithole countries! At that level, who said what becomes very important, that is, the message is given prominence because of the stature and calibre of the messenger.

The proverb, according to Wikipedia, is ‘often used to convey that someone who is not respectful or grateful to their roots or heritage will eventually be rejected or ostracised by their community! The left hand, we are told, is for personal hygiene. We don’t use it to give or receive gifts; we don’t use it to serve drinks or for traditionally important functions.

In the African context, a bastard child is not one who was born out of wedlock or whose father is not known to the family. Bastard child represents a person who is disconnected from their family. Pointing to the family house with the left hand is indicative of disrespect.

These thoughts flooded my mind when I read recently elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, gave some hard and bad knocks to Nigeria, the Nigeria Police, and governance in her Nigeria, her ancestral home. To be sure, nobody who has encountered some men of the Nigeria Police in action can fault Kemi. Her chemistry of being brutally frank is what has taken Kemi to the heights in Conservative Party politics. Whether she can indeed lead the Party to victory in an election is a different kettle of fish. As the potential leader of the British government, all cards will count when push gets to shove. Which is why Kemi should remember that no well-trained child points to the family house with the left hand.

Nigeria is in process. It is a building site. And we started this project of disparate and different cultures fused together when the British pounced on our ancestors to create Nigeria. We look back to the years when a British monarch, King Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), who ate two of his six wives for breakfast and dinner. Wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed by beheading. Jane Seymour died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps if Diana had emerged in the 15^th century as wife to a British monarch, the reigning king would have sent her to the guillotine instead of the tunnel in Paris! Some British monarchs actively participated, supported, and profited from the transatlantic slave trade. British monarchs oversaw the colonisation of indigenous lands in Africa, North America, and Australia sometimes through genocide! No where in Africa, our dear left-handed and grandly insolent Kemi, would a Prime Minister allow his wife to remain in an adulterous relationship for decades as Harold Macmillan did with wife Lady Dorothy Macmillan did with the bisexual Bob Boothby in the 20^th Britain!

We may need to remind Kemi that racism still dominated policing in Britain as it does in much of the Western world. Yet, we have not painted the entire police system as being racist. Indeed, Kemi, without officialdom around her can still be profiled by a police officer if she were found driving alone in some areas of London! Her skin colour, is not typically British, I dare say. Yet, we have not said that Britain is racist. The ‘how dark’ racist discussions which precipitated Harry and Meghan fleeing the British monarchy is still very fresh and raw in our consciousness; yet, Nigeria’s Vice President has not called the British monarchy a racist institution.

Time will fail me to discuss the Damilola Taylor case in year 2000 when the Metropolitan Police handling of Taylor’s murder was seen as slow and inadequate due to racial bias. By the way, Damilola was both British and Yoruba like our illustrious and petulant Kemi who believes in giving hard knocks! What about the Stephen Lawrence 1993 murder case which the Metropolitan Police badly handled owing to racial bias? In 1999, Roger Sylvester, a Black man, died in police custody and an inquest showed that the police used excessive force. In 2009, newspaper vendor Ian Tom died after being struck by a police officer during the G20 protests in London. The 1999 Macpherson Report, which investigated the Stephen Lawrence case, concluded that ‘the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist! As late as 2017, the Lammy Review which was led David Lammy (MP) concluded that “black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and imprisoned than their white counterparts! Need I say more?

So, our dear daughter and bright star Kemi in the British firmament, we shall not point to you with our left hand, because in spite of you, you are our daughter. We can only say that the Nigeria Police is in good company of the Empire of the Police system which was created in 1820 by your progenitors from the other side! Colonial vestiges are not easy to shake off!

Opinion

Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State

Published

12 hours ago

December 22, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.

(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.

From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.

However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.

First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.

Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.

No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.

If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.

To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.

The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com

Opinion

Fear Of Witchcraft And Politics In Zambia

Published

1 day ago

December 21, 2024

NewTimes

Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State

Dr Leo Igwe

By Leo Igwe

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.

This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.

Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?

The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.

Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.

In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.

Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!

Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.