Kelvin Obambon|24 July 2018
A former senator who represented Cross River Southern Senatorial District at the 7th Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and currently board member of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Senator Prince Bassey Edet Otu, says if Nigeria is to get it right in leadership and governance, then there is the need to learn from history NegroidHaven can report authoritatively.
Prince Otu made this assertion on Thursday at a public lecture organized by the Post Graduate Students' Government(PGSG) of the University of Calabar, where he presented a paper as one of the guest speakers.
Delivering his lecture titled, ''Change viz-a-viz Politics in Contemporary Nigeria'', Senator Otu who was represented by Hon. Patrick Asikpo Okon, stressed the need for Nigeria to learn from history as it will guides the country toward steering the right path in leadership and governance.
He also said conscious efforts should be made to strengthen institutions in the country, describing as unfortunate a situation where an individual appears stronger than the institutions.
Speaking further, the ex-federal legislator indirectly attributed the failure in the education sector to excessive influence of the nation's political elites, whom he said, engage students as political thugs, thereby diverting their attention away from their studies. The result of this, according to him, is that the educational system ends up producing graduates who are mentally and psychologically inadequate.
He however posited that true change can occur only when the elites, anti-corruption agencies, the media, civil societies and every stakeholder rise up to their moral, social and political responsibilities.
His words: ''Coming back to our contemporary politics, what Nigeria needs to do is to study history and learn from the past. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Our task is to learn and make sure we are not deceived into recycling failed leaders whowill repeat their actions of making Nigeria poorer, even when we have the natural and human resources to attain a reasonable standard of living for all, not just a selected few of our people.
''It's rather unfortunate in our country today or in contemporary politics, a single individual is stronger than the institutions put together. We need to evolve conscious efforts to strengthen our institutions for posterity.
''Our students are busy recruiting themselves into cultism, buying the best of barota piston rather than textbooks and getting involve in all social vices, being used by politicians to assassinate their opponents for a peanut -that is why we have thousand of schools and institutions of higher learning today than about twenty years ago, but you can't compare the standards, and yet there are many more educated people now than then. What is the mental and psychological quality of the educated people today?
''We all clamour for change? -let me give you an analogy -thus, when people genuinely become indignant at failed infrastructure, failed services, failed officials, we must pungently ask the million naira questions: Where are our elites? Where are our watchdog institutions? Where are the whistle blowers? Where are the civil groups? Where are those who ought to be untiringly protesting and struggling toward recovering a little more foothold of the moral waters -edge in the vast fungi of corruption that is consuming us?
If we pose those questions well, I suspect that we would come to an embarrassing conclusion on how we all have abysmally failed in the discharge of our moral, social and political responsibilities.''
Obambon blogs for NegroidHaven
