We have young people who have no idea of their history —MAUTECH VC

Professor Kyari Mohammed is the Vice-Chancellor of Modibbo Adama University of Technology, MAUTECH, Yola, Adamawa State.

In this chat with Vanguard Learning in Yola, the Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Peace and Security Studies at the university, speaks on the removal of history from secondary school curriculum and its impact on society.  He says that part of the problem bedevilling the nation is the fact that many of the youths know next to nothing about the history of Nigeria.  Excerpts:

WHAT was the rationale behind the removal of history from the curriculum?

Well, not necessarily removing it. The government is doing something about it though. The Historical Society met with the President sometime in February this year. The President has agreed that History will now be taught in secondary schools.

But why did they think of removing it in the first place?

They had removed it long ago. It is under the new National Policy on Education.

Under the new policy, history was removed as a compulsory course in senior secondary school so at the junior secondary school level, they introduced Social Studies. This was to incorporate some history, political science, some sociology, civic education and some form of citizenship education.

Citizenship education


I guess that was the idea, but after several years, some of the problems that we see in our country is that we have come up with young people who have grown up to be adults but have no idea of where they are coming from. That partly explains some of the problems we have in Nigeria where someone will just wake up one morning to say he will fight you on the basis of your religion or ethnicity or your region without understanding the historical basis of Nigeria.

If they had read history and come to realise that in spite of all our differences, people had actually existed within the same territory called Nigeria long before British colonial rule; then that would have helped substantially.

One other thing that history would have told them is that Nigerian had been trading for thousands of years. It is not something that came up in 1914 when the British said okay, we are going to amalgamate British territories of Southern and Northern Nigeria.

These are things they would have learnt from history but as it is now, you see people who have finished secondary school without having any idea of the history of their country. So anything an illiterate says on the pages of newspapers or radio or television, they take it as the Bible truth so actually.

Some sense of historical consciousness and knowledge of history will add substantially to our understanding of ourselves as citizens of Nigeria. We should also understand the relationship between Nigerians and other Africans and the role of Nigeria in the wider world. I am sure some sense of history will definitely help. Though it is coming back after a lot of destruction has been done.

Most of our graduates, upon graduation look for white collar jobs instead of creating jobs. Do you think our curriculum should be made more practical?

We are all doing white collar jobs so why should they go for difficult blue collar jobs? If there is a structural problem and unemployment in our country, we should find a means of identifying and dealing with them. I know you are coming from all this talk about adding entrepreneurship into our education. These are all coming from the IMF and the World Bank.

No matter what level of entrepreneurship education you give, you are still going to have a substantial number of the population who are unemployed for as long as the economy grows along those lines, as long as we have several millions coming out of the universities when the economy itself is not expanding, and as long as the informal sector of the economy is not supported by the state. There will be several problems.

Entrepreneurship will not employ everyone either. We cannot all be entrepreneurs. The Nigerian economy is large because of the informal sector so if you want to create jobs, then you support the informal sector especially the small and medium scale rather than saying people that come out of the universities should be entrepreneurs. Okay, I have some good entrepreneurial ideas, how do I fund it? That itself becomes a problem. You talk about You-Win or Sure-P, it is still a form of tokenism, it is not going to solve the problem. There is a fundamental problem with the economy. We are running a system very much like the US. A high percentage of the income in this country is in the hands of a few so that is a major problem.

So we should practice Socialism as China?

China has one of the fastest growing number of billionaires in the world now so also is Russia. The number of millionaires is very high and the number of poor people is very high so Nigeria is not an exception. 

Mass failure in WAEC, who is to blame?

I don’t want to accuse an examining body. We probably will have to look at our educational system completely. Those of us in the universities complain about the products that come into the university so if you need to look at your education, you have to look at the primary school that feeds the secondary school and you have to look at the secondary school that feeds the university; you have to talk about the quality of teachers in those schools, the facilities in terms of classrooms, laboratories, reading materials etc., then there has to be a conscious government policy of making sure that public schools work.

Tweet