The Case Against Sex Education

 By Sonny Ekwowusi

Last week, a group of pro-choice NGOs staged a protest against the Hon. Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu for directing the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) to expunge the current immoral sex education taught in Nigerian schools from the school curriculum.

Worried about the immoral content of sex education curriculum in Nigeria and the wrong method deployed in using it to corrupt impressionable secondary school and primary school pupils most of whom are in the age bracket of 5-14 years, the Hon. Minister had directed last week that the immoral sex education should be removed from the school curriculum and that the teaching of sex education should be left in the hands of parents who are the primary educators of their children and religious institutions which are the custodians of morals of young people. 

How JAMB Is Destroying Education In Nigeria

By Luke Onyekakeyah  

Two shocks in the tertiary education sector that have jolted Nigerians, once again, show how the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is geared towards ruining the future of Nigeria. It also proves the much-talked about need to scrap JAMB, which has outlived its usefulness, to allow universities admit qualified candidates.

The Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu and JAMB registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede are behind this national embarrassment. Could President Muhammadu Buhari save the future of this country by reversing these retrogressive decisions? This is not the kind of change we need.

First is the appalling and disgusting slashing of university cut-off marks from an awful and lamentable 180 (45 per cent) to a deplorable and scandalous 120 (30 per cent). It is like the 180 score didn’t get Nigeria at the jugular, which the 120 is now out to accomplish. Without equivocation, these say much about the direction the country is headed. 

The second is the re-introduction of post-UTME test that was banned barely a year ago by the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu. What is a post-UTME test going to achieve when failures, who scored 30 per cent, in JAMB are admitted. Is it possible for candidates who scored 30 per cent in JAMB to score 80 per cent in post-UTME test? This is most unlikely and would call for investigation if it happens.

‪#‎Bring Back Our History

By Moses E. Ochonu

The Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, said recently that the Nigerian government will restore history to the secondary school curriculum. For inexplicable reasons, history was excised from the curriculum some eight years ago. They better get started on the implementation because historical illiteracy and amnesia is slowly killing the country. We are a country afflicted by an epidemic of forgetting and "moving forward." 

*Moses Ochonu

The absence of historical consciousness in Nigeria hurts the country in multiple ways. Take corruption. Many Nigerians believe that corruption only entered the Nigerian political lexicon during our latest flirtation with democracy, that is, post-1999. A few may cite the military era that preceded the fourth republic. Very few remember or are familiar with the corruption of the second republic, let alone the fact that the first republic was rocked by multiple corruption scandals.

The absence of historical memory in this domain of corruption is the reason many Nigerians say Nigeria should “move forward” instead of investigating past crimes. Grappling with the past and addressing its tragedies and residual pains is seen as moving backwards. It is the reason many are willing, even eager, to forgive past political crimes against the Nigerian people. It is the reason we are too quick to move on to new scandals, get bored with old ones, and fail to see a trans-regime tapestry of corruption and abuse of power. It is the reason we see political malfeasance and misbehavior in isolated blocks rather than as continuities.

This dearth of history in our public discourse is the reason old criminals are quickly ignored and manage to sneak back, unnoticed, into the orbit of power, their crimes forgotten. It is the reason that politicians delay their corruption trials, knowing that our legendary short memory and disconnection from history will buy them time, enabling their troubles to fizzle out.

It is as though our baseline of remembering is yesterday. It was Chinua Achebe who said perspicaciously that, if we are going to fix Nigeria, we should go back to when the rain started beating us. This was a compelling statement on the value of retrospective reflection, of history, in our search for diagnostic and ameliorative ideas. The irony and problem is that many Nigerians believe that the proverbial rain started beating us in 2010, 1999, or with the annulment of the June 12 presidential election in 1993.