By Gbola Oba
I used to think I was mad on my conviction of the utter obsolescence of the global educational system until I heard this iconoclast! (Please watch the attached video and then come and read this write-up like you want to write an examination on it. #Lol)
Education based on memorialisation is DEAD! Showing pupils/students how to information-navigate (like we teach people to drive and then allow them, once we’ve established that they’ve attained driving competence, to drive to any destination of their choice/passion) should be the new focus of education.
That’s why the soon-to-be-crowned “Village Letter Writers” (who’ll be as important as the first generation of “western educated” interpreters or letter writers of yore, who interfaced on behalf of their communities with the then colonial officers and gained functional honour and respect far and above historic cultural aristocrats because of their, ironically, often comically incoherent literary and numeracy skills and, far importantly, the power inherent in their been regularly seen hobnobbing with “Oyinbo Pepper, Yukuyuku…”) will be Coders, Programmers, Algorithm Scribes, etc. Simply put, Computer Science buffs and enthusiasts (please note that I didn’t write “graduates”! One of the most successful young entrepreneurs I know in Nigeria-who, as far back as 10 years plus ago, rebuffed legal emigration opportunity to Germany, Dele Odufuye, a two or more times winner of the famous “Futures Award” in Nigeria, who runs a successful ICT venture, @Tsaboin, with his younger brother, @Kunle Odufuye, graduated in Toxicology and the brother in Mathematics or something not directly related to computing or computer science. It was the empowering vision held by their late dad then that infotech skills would ultimately give them employability cum enterprise advantage in future, some quarter of a century ago, which made him buy them a desktop PC and allowed them to physically, i.e. hardware wise, and digitally, programming wise, abuse it; Dele once told me how he lost count of the number of times they disassembled and reassembled the unfortunate PC and how they DOS-understood its language beyond the ostensible GUI interface that the majority of computer or computer-powered device users interact with! It was those skills that childhood/playful curiosity, far more than college education, bequeathed them that’ve made them to be sustainable employers of labour today! Indeed, Dele started earning far and above graduate-level pay from his undergrad days in @FUNAB, Abeokuta, when a female lecturer whose hubby was an IT Manager of a blue chip company, introduced him to her husband who was pleasantly shocked that the young man could write computer programmes that he was spending millions of naira to get expats to… I used to be very happy that the boys pampered their mechanical engineer dad after the motoring accident which constrained him to a wheelchair) will be Techies.
I religiously tell youngsters (western educationally brilliant or not) to learn and master the infotech dynamics powering any natural or occupational passion they have. All trades, hobbies and proclivities (like @Samuel Ajayi Crowder who translated the Bible to Yoruba and Igbo and @Samuel Johnson who wrote the first book on the History Of The Yoruba, the first set of our heroes past to codify faith, history, folklore, etc, which had existed before their births, into writing and still hold unending legendary status because of their literacy and literary works) are not only now dependent on information technology but the relevance and economic fortunes of the hobbyists and/or professionals will soon be defined by the level of IT competence-as in operating cutting edge tools and/or, far more importantly, programme the algorithm upon which the tools/equipment function. A bosom friend and business partner, @Kehinde Ekisola, knows how dogmatic I am about code-writing and my vocational-education-enterprise partners, @Austin Adekunle Shonaike @Babatunde Faleye @Olawumi Gasper @Sam Koya Adeyemi @Sakiru Oresanya @Lukman Lawal Garu and others too numerous to mention, know how I accentuate the importance of letting trainees add competence in the use and manipulation of state-of-the-art tools/equipment in the trades in which they’re being trained to the realisation that automation and robotics will soon make any mental and/or physical skills they have to be outdated, but that those who own tomorrow are not those who, like the 19th century Luddites who violently resisted the mechanisation of the textile industry, fight the inevitable trend but those who own it, by being comfortable with it and are seen to have the competence to operate the tools or, indeed, invent them!
In concluding, I’ve either tagged you to this publication or I’ve specifically sent it to you (indeed, put it in a forum that you belong to) because of a PRIMARY REASON that’ll be clearly stated after a brief story about myself and the relatively humbling fame my name and my face command. Twenty years ago, I convinced myself that intellectual content merchandising, especially before a televisual tool (something akin to broadcast journalism), would define the future of public intellection in Nigeria; where, in furtherance of my late mother’s (who I fondly called Iya-Eleja) prophesy, “Adisa, o ma soro ni Nigeria yi Ijoba agbo, Ijoye agba ara’lu a pon e le” (transliteration: You shall speak in this Nigeria, the good and the great must listen and the masses shall honour you), I was mentally loading developmental contents and governance strategies in the UK and the EU zone where I then resided. Albeit I’ve always loved writing since my secondary school days but Africans, particularly Nigerians don’t read! So, I went into independent TV production and soon discovered I was beholding to the vagaries of the trade’s necessary tools’ handlers (cameramen, video editors and broadcast platform owners). A sobering postmortem analysis of the then level of anxiety I was having as a result of my dealings with the human elements in the production and broadcasting value chain, made me to learn camera-handling, video-editing and I was, with a fellow church member who was one of the few internet broadcasting IT gurus in our London community then, registered www.universalise.com, a commercial video broadcasting platform with which I serviced the vanity of some pentecostal pastors (the infamous Kenyan Pastor Gilbert Deya was my highest spending client then) who wanted to stream the recorded video contents of what they believed was their most celebrated preachments. I soon moved into conventional satellite television through BEN TV, where the independence those forced-to-acquire skills and my unorthodox political punditry made some Nigerian governors, ministers, a former head of state, a then sitting vice president and some African presidents with many eminent Africans-like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Late Prof. Wangaru Maathu Maathai, the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, and Afro-Caribbeans became my content-minefield. If political content packaging (through interviews, punditry and near-propagandising for some Nigerian politicos) was giving me good money, fame and robust access to people in power, I was so very disillusioned with it. In my quest to diversify into non-political contents to consolidate my televisual enterprise away from politics, I accidentally fumbled the car-radio’s dial after a breakfast meeting, in late 2009 or early 2010, with one of my gubernatorial clients then to a unique automotive mechatronics radio programme, AUTOMEDICS that my principal automotive business partner now, @Kunle Shonaike, was anchoring. Titillated and enamoured with the quality of content he was dishing out through the radio show, I concluded I needed to do a TV documentary on him as a fellow returnee revolutionising the chaotic world of auto maintenance/repair in Nigeria then. Soon after the commencement of the docu-drama (as members of the motoring public brought their vehicles for the dramatisation of auto-diagnosis skills by Kunle, and @Benedict Okoh), I concluded that with or without me Kunle must start a training institute to up skill the largely ignorant “roadside mechanics”, who, as I’d unfortunately experienced with the sheer vandalisation of my first two cars in Nigeria, needed the skills-empowerment… One thing led to the other, particularly Kunle telling me that his forte was in “grease-monkeying” I, driven by conviction once again, opted to start and run the training institute around him. Today, nearly ten years after, we have more than 7000 (seven thousand) alumni, with more than 1000 (one thousand) businesses, averaging 5 employees with our alumni owners spanning the length and breadth of our very large country, literally started and owned by graduates of the institute (many of whom, unlike the artisanal mechanics we originally conceptualised the training for, are tertiary institution graduates!)
The remarkable success of the @Automedics Nigeria www.automedicsafrica.com training experience from about six years ago, convinced me it could be replicated in the problematic world of Nigeria’s building and construction sector, which is bedevilled with wasteful artisanal incompetence and professional disconnect! About two years ago www.ulda-edu.ng was started with a group of diaspora trained and experientially exposed construction experts, just like Kunle is for me in automotive. The adoption of the institute by NECA as a training facilitator in the construction trades exemplifies its magnificent success. However, the greatest good that www.ulda-edu.ng’s creation has birthed for me is the coalition or aggregation of Nigerian real estate and infrastructure development enthusiasts or investors who are members of the cooperatives (ULDA AND PARTNERS-OSHODI-MULTIPURPOSE COOPERATIVE LTD, in Lagos, www.ukuldacoop.org in London, UK, and another sister outfit registered in Baltimore, USA) leveraging the skilled workforce the institute produces to deliver quality affordable mass-housing and infrastructure developments. This classical business or investment social-enterprise instructs this missive to you. The frustrated single parent mum of a young startup techpreneur once called me after a session of a daily morning news analysis radio programme I do every morning I’m in Lagos at www.city1051fm.com. She was distraught that the young man, @Tosin Tuyi, was putting too much into barely eking a living. After listening to her emotive story, I told her to let the boy call me, the call led to a couple of meetings and he intimated me with his vision to kick start Ikorodu’s equivalent of the now world famous “Yaba Co-Habitation Hub”. My wife, Divine Grace, has graciously obliged one of the vacant apartments in her 6-apartment 3-storey building inside the sprawling estate of her late mother on Itokin Road, opposite Federal Low Cost Housing Estate in Ikorodu. I NEED 99 (NINETY NINE) MORE BELIEVERS IN THE NIGERIAN YOUTH TO JOIN ME IN CO-INVESTING N50, 000 (FIFTY THOUSAND NAIRA) EACH IN KICK STARTING THE VENTURE.
NB: This is not a call to charity. It’s a social enterprise investment that must recompense your investment financially and (apart from the fact that Tosin Tuyi with his technical partners will be democratising codewriting, programming and robotics skills to local underprivileged kids) on which your business can leverage to solve IT problems at competitive rate. Please Facebook Messenger me “IKD TECH HUB” if you want to join me and my wife in bringing this skills- cum enterprise-empowerment project into reality.
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