As The Black Man Attains The White-Man’s Coveted Professorship…

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Written By Ikechukwu Enyiagu, [email protected]

The law of diminishing returns, which is sometimes also referred to as the law of variable proportions, is a clearly verifiable economic concept which states that as more investment is made into a given and fixed area, overall return on that investment increases at a declining rate from a certain point in the investment. In other to explain this well enough for all and sundry, I will use two illustrations:

  1. Supposing one has a given plot of land where he plants tomato crops which yield a given sized harvest of tomatoes as a result of a bag of fertilizer used on it, adding two bags of fertilizer could make the harvest bigger and better. This law however states that going further to add three bags of fertilizer could yield more number of tomato heads but which, in this case, would be smaller per head. Adding four bags of fertilizers to the beds of tomatoes grown in that given area of land would produce the impact of this law of diminishing returns: Much input but less or no gain.
  2. Using my early understanding of this law as I was taught in my secondary school days, I would illustrate it thus: supposing you were so hungry that you felt you could eat a horse, and you went into a restaurant. Now your favorite meal is, maybe, hamburger. So, sizing up your hunger, you dashed to the counter and ordered for four burgers. Then you started off with the first…and down it went. It tasted very sweet – just like you remembered it last. Now you have gone through the second burger but your stomach shows signs of satisfaction, yet you still had two more staring at you in the face. You are now filled but there was no friend in sight to help you out with the other two. So, you forced yourself to take one more in. But, this time, your famous hamburger no longer tastes delicious. So you probably left the remaining burger on the table and left or you threw it into a bin. Now, your stomach is so heavy you are now finding it hard to walk out of the restaurant. What your body feels is the effect of the law of diminishing returns: the adventure you happily anticipated gave way to loss and regrets.

 

In the two illustrations above, it’s clear that the importance of applying economics to life cannot be over-emphasized. Without it, the good will become the bad, and the bad, the ugly. How many times have you set out to do something good only to find out that your good became your bad? Listen to the laws. Have you ever seen parents (or perhaps you are one) who took particular actions supposedly “for the interest” of their children and turned out harming those very children? The law of life calls to such. In all that man does, the future, the aftermath, and posterity should never be sacrificed at the alter of “the now.” And in other to correctly position the results of the future to the expectations of today, the past must play its very vital role; life is entangled in the energy of the past, the present and the future. Zeroing in on the impacts and adverse effects of education, one must not forget the stretching limit of the one thus educated. Having said that, I would like to use “Nigerian Professors” and paper chasers, in this matter, as my point of focus.

Now to the matter at hand and how it concerns Africa: The importance of education cannot be over-emphasized. Education is so crucial that it’s always remained the sharpest and deadliest tool for mankind – depending on which side it is turned. In any environment where it’s properly utilized, lights spring up. But where men merely go through the rituals of acquiring this knowledge, it becomes a curse and a burden to any society where such a person lives and influences. Amongst Nigerian men (refers to the sexes) who have proven the indispensability of education can be found medical doctors (many of whom, as statistics proves,  are occupying noticeable positions in the medical fields in the US, UK, and other countries of the world where expertise is highly valued and compensated), engineers; people like professor Chinua Achebe (whose literary work showcased Igbo culture and story to the world), Professor Wole Soyinka (yet another man of nobility, whose works have put in the centre of change as an indispensable influence), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (once-young girl who took the opportunity of education to have now become an enviable mother and a world-changer), Engineer Philip Emeagwali (who defied the slave-mentality and presented to the world a new possibility in science), Late Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu (who saw tomorrow and proffered the only viable solutions), etc. Time constraints would not allow me to mention many of such great men in Nigeria whose contributions have defied the written letters and accepted that knowledge is an action force.

 

Having clearly stated the benefits of conscious investment in education in Nigeria, I now want to state that the neglect of the economics of proper education, helping the already situated corruption-virus, has further led Nigeria to the declivity of abysmal ignorance; hence, today, what Nigeria mostly has is a sea of educated ignoramus. And when ignorance matures, it generates a level of foolishness which will, in turn, hunt the credential-bearers. The purpose for learning “1+1” is to understand why it is 2, and why, when given a different condition, it can remain 1. But when the society turns from the proof of knowledge to the proof of papers, it begins to decline with the speed at which ignorance destroys the ignoramus. Today, as it shows, Nigeria has the highest rate of certificate-pursuers, masters in different fields and professors – in Africa. Yet, the economists have no solution for the economy; the doctors prescribe Panadol for every illness; our civil engineers cannot explain why our roads have been clothed with dilapidation; Our senior Police officers pride in force instead of maintaining law and order, the so-called law makers only know how to make laws to cover their filthiness and their gross-wickedness; the judges have become kings to whom you must pay a night visit if you wish to escape the hang-man’s noose in the morning, and our very dear lecturers, having seen that “certificate” for Nigerians now means more than the education itself, have each carved out for themselves the size of machete they could carry as they cut morals, reason, sanity, patriotism from each student. The “students,” on whose bodies the cane lands, must have the certificate at all cost. What would you expect? And while these go on, the government plans to build more universities yet declares that it can no longer support the existing ones.

 

The climax of this madness takes center-stage in all Nigerian fora – be it for ethnic or national purpose. In these forums you would find men who boldly append to their names their varying degrees, prefixes, suffixes and titles. Going through the names of contributors and participants, and the prefixes and suffixes to their names, if you were coming from the moon, you would think their names represent the only advanced people on earth. But are they advanced? Yes. However, sadly, the law of diminishing returns caught up with them. To a greater extent, the root of their challenges can be traced to the foundation of “One ‘non-working’ Nigeria.”  With most of them being referred to as “professors,” one wonders: what has the white-man’s coveted best done to the black man? Graduates manage affairs, those with Masters direct affairs, while professors find innovations for advancement in their fields – all yet in the quest for discoveries. But what you have amongst our educated bests are men who have climbed to the highest tree and are now entangled in the web of the confusion of misplaced purposes for education, – stranded and unable to, at least, climb down. In many of the fora, they have turned every deliberation into spittoons for hormonal race of the machos: no one ever instigates any advancement prescription from the well of his many doctorates. Do we then have to wonder why Nigeria has always been led by babies (the so-called Senators, House of Rep members and the great judges who answer to the proud name: “My lord”) whose bests (education) begin and end with their gluttonous looting of public wealth for personal aggrandizements?  Listening to our doctors and professors as they deliberate, one would see a country led by great toddler-men and their children being constantly groomed for (ironically, for imbecilic ignorance) “selfish success.” Reading through the lines of these Nigeria’s  great men of the books, one would discover that war has been going on in Nigeria along tribal divides, and that, now being waged by the educated Nigerian fathers and grandfathers,  this war is not about to end. But it should do to note that identifying a divide is necessary to avoiding bloody wars; at least, our professors and scholars should have been taught this. But the picture is this: The imploding foundation of Nigeria gave rise to men of different academic fields who have scholarly been pressed to unproductively as a result of redundant monotony of visionless and non-innovative education. Good enough, these Nigerian professors and scholars have realized, albeit in a hard way, the impossibility of a continued “One-Nigeria” as it is: they are ever more tribal, diverging and hereditarily unflinching about One-Nigeria’s many impossibilities. Now, don’t wave it aside: I’m talking about our “professors!”

 

What is the way forward? The foundation is dirty and laid in insincerity. Without a shed of doubt, it is the foundation of Nigeria which carries the foundation of the society and those who live in it. For a few who are privileged to study (have studied) abroad under good tutelage, not much of your bests can be impacted upon Nigeria because those on ground whose understanding of education is the “paper” would quickly consult the pull-him-down spirit once your light threatens their dark hideouts from where they constantly molest and crush the less fortunate in the society. There’s the story of a lady who finished her undergraduate education in the States and returned to Nigeria to serve her country in an office where men with big academic names could not find a single button to their predicament. When, after having watched their best and seniors fumble through their academic ignorance for some time, she offered to help and got it right within minutes. Then, threats started coming to her from all angles. Consequently, she had to flee from her country back to the white-man’s land for safety and sanity. It is the foundation that must be visited to correct all these. You don’t have to be a bigot, ethnocentric, tribal, or even a patriot to understand the danger these revelations pose to the future, of our now, and that of our children; you only have to be a truly educated person. The desire for higher academic attainments is a noble one; however, when the ambition and pursuit of a particular class of knowledge is not as noble as the course of that knowledge, the ultimate goal of education is defeated. When you have graduated in your course, when you have mastered your discipline, and when you have become a knight in your field of study, you would have realized the indispensability of a deep and true foundation. Until our so-called doctors of many academic fields and professors of different professions begin to come together to analyze and sort out the foundation of this equation called Nigeria, the answer long-expected may continue to elude all. Until then, those who rush for certificates instead of knowledge may not be undoing merely themselves, but the Nigerian society and the world at large would have found them, after all inputs, the perfect specimen for the proofs of the law of diminishing returns. Let those who are truly educated – in arts, science, technology, and religion – rise up and rebuild the future. But before then, the old and decayed foundation will have to give way. One does not (a)mend a decaying house simply by adding/removing wooden platforms; strong and rocky pillars must be put in place. Often than not, a fresh start proves to be cheaper, quicker, stronger and lasting. That’s visiting the foundation, that’s true wisdom; and that’s how to truly stand – a conscious and self-defendable educated “Black Man.”

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