Mariam Mariam
Obiageli Ezekwesili (often addressed as ‘Doctor’, but is she a doctorate degree holder really?), is one of the leading memebers of Obasanjo’s ‘reform team’. This exceedingly selt-righteous woman is said to be a born-again evangelical Christian (rather in the mould of controversial individuals like George Bush). Mrs Ezekwesili is an ultra-reactionary, right-wing zealot who wears her convictions like a gown.
This woman has a very sharp tongue; she lashes out with venom at anybody who dares to cross her. I should know. On the morning that the late Etsu Nuep died, Nasir el-Rufai, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), INVITED Editors of the Nigerian media to a breakfast meeting at the Sheraton Hotel, Abuja I think it was in September 2003, a few months after Obasanjo had massively rigged himself back to power, and the much vaunted ‘economic team’ was just announcing its entry into Nigeria’s political economy. el-Rufai had brought his colleague, Obiageli Ezekwesili in tow, presumably to kill two birds with a stone, as it were, that morning.
Nasir el-Rufai unfurled the banner of the plans to sanitise Abuja, something that he has done with a very single-minded devotion, I must admit, but not without an attendant controversy. Mrs Ezekwesili came to the Breakfast briefing to win the Editors for the neo-liberal agenda, the philosophical underpinning of the NEEDS platform, which the Obasanjo administration had decided to implement, on the back of the tainted mandate which came from a stolen election in May 2003.
And this was where Obiageli Ezekwesili came into the picture. She launched into her presentation with the enthusiasm of a genuine believer. It is the won’t of the born-again type to see the world only in the starkly contrasting colours of ‘black and white’, ‘they or us’, ‘right versus wrong’. This is the world of fanatics like Osama Bin Laden and George Bush, and unfortunately, it seems it is the niche that Mrs Ezekwesili also occupies. The fanatic in politics, as in religion, does not appreciate the grey area between black and white there can only be one right way of seeing the phenomena of nature and of society, his or her own.
Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili, a disciple of Washington the IMF and World Bank, apparently does not accept that there cannot be just one way of seeing the phenomenon of economic reforms, and she made made it clear that September morning at the Sheraton Hotel. For questioning the philosophical of her theology’ of neo-liberal capitalism, she gave me the short shift and described me as ‘anti-intellectual , ostensibly because the only thing ‘intellectual’ in her viciously right-wing mind was total surrender of the nation’s patrimony to the gods of marketplace capitalism via the privatisation road that they have taken our country through m the Past seven years, but especially since 2003.
This is a road that we all now know has been paved with the dubious results of offloading our patrimony into the hands of Obasanjo and his cronies; it is the road which took us through the crimes perpetrated against Nigeria’s vital interest in the PENTASCOPE husbandry of NITEL; the illegalities at Ajaokuta Steel Company, and the emergence of the controversial TRANSCORP, to mention but a few. For Obiageli Ezekwesili, there is apparently no alternative (remember Margaret Thatcher and ‘TINA’?) to selling off everything in the public realm to the ‘all-profitable’, ‘all-productive’ private sector. What matters in the inner recesses of the reactionary mind of this woman is the cost effectiveness of all and every institution. Unfortunately, the public service is not, therefore, we must sell off everything and we shall inherit the paradise of capitalism, almost like the ‘kingdom of heaven’!
Unfortunately for the Nigerian people, but to the benefit of imperialism and the bandit capitalists which Obasanjo’s regime has fostered in the past seven years, Mrs Ezekwesili has the official cover to continue her gung-ho defence of market fundamentalist capitalism, the bare-knuckled capitalism without a human face, EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN by Nigeria s Constitution, but which has been the ruling mantra of the regime. She seems to relish the space she has been given to turn various sectors into a social laboratory of inflicting pains on the Nigerian people and in this anti-people streak, she resembles her boss, Olusegun Obasanjo.
Obiageli Ezekwesili has been in the news in recent weeks, but all for the wrong reasons. She has taken the decision to privatise Unity Schools, the Federal Government Secondary Schools pread all across Nigeria, a total of one hundred and two (102). Obiageli Ezekwesili s reason for the decision to privatise these schools was that the step had become necessary to redress their rapidly falling academic standards and decay or outright absence of basic infrastructure and amenities in the face of the enormous resources (!) being allocated to the schools by the Federal Government. Ezekwesili’s “greatest concern is the fact that the ministry (Federal Ministry of Education) spends an inordinate amount of time and resources on these schools that constitute only 30 percent of the secondary schools in the countiy. Out of 6.4 million secondary school students, only 120, 718 are in the unity schools. This number cannot on any account justify the disproportionate amount of staff and budget allocated to these schools. This has to be reversed.
We have to do things differently as the current business model cannot be sustained”. For Oby Ezekwesili, the only path of rectitude is to privatise these schools!
This woman is locked in an untenable rightwing ideological mindset, and she sees the essence of management and funding of the unity schools only from the narrow prison of a “business model” that “can no longer be sustained”. For Oby (who has no known record of fight for democracy and does not have the electoral mandate of the Nigerian people), the vision of creating unity schools to produce an educated elite able to develop nationalist consciousness within the ambience of these schools has been rendered naught by their pecuniary failures. Never mind her grudging acknowledgement of a “40-year old model to achieve the noble dreams of earlier decades”, because according to her, “in the light of modem Nigeria’s impinging constraints” (occasioned by the crazy economic ‘reforms’ of neo-liberal capitalism they have been forcing down the country’s throat), the “vision (has) fossilise (d)”.
The vision of national unity, forged through the creation of these schools, had given an opening to children of all ethnic groups and class backgrounds (poor, middle-class and rich) the opportunity to study within the ambience of these national institutions; they get to know themselves; understand their differences; build friendships across their different divides and learn to forge national perspectives that become very useful in the building of a post-civil war Nigeria. But from the ideological viewpoint that Oby Ezekwesili represents, hence her assertion that “in the light of modem Nigeria’s impinging constraints”, the visions that created those schools in the first place are expendable. As an undertaker 6f national institutions, to serve the atomising needs of neo-liberal- capitalism and imperialism, Ezekwesili can only treat the feelings of the Nigerian people with disdain. Her litany is constant: “privatise, privatise and ever more privatisation”!
Yet this is a decision that is terribly unpopular with the Nigerian people. The Senate Committee on Education is against it; the Nigeria Labour Congress has spoken about its dangers; the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria is up in arms against it; parents are very apprehensive about what the future holds and the Nigerian press has written several editorials pointing out some of the blatant lies underpinning the spurious arguments used to justify an a priori ideological, but unpatriotic decision to sell Nigeria’s one hundred and two unity schools.
An important element of democracy is that elected governments might propose to take decisions, but a groundswell of popular feeling could build up which shows a clear rejection of that proposed decision. But because the government has come to power on the basis of the popular will, it retreats and drops the idea or modifies in tune with the popular will. This unfortunately has not been the case with Nigeria in the past seven years. Obasanjo does not enjoy the popular will of the Nigerian people; he lacks legitimacy because he came to power on the crest of a massively rigged election. Devoid of popular legitimacy, he scorns the Nigerian people, implements policies no matter how unpopular, because any deference to the people is misconstrued as weakness, which tests the will of the regime. He is afraid that a retreat on any issue might lead to more concessions to the popular will and an ultimate unravelling of a regime that has been built on a foundation of fraud, a tainted mandate and the insecurity which accompanies its lack of legitimacy. Regimes like Obasanjo’s without legitimacy implement anti-people policies through technocrats such as Mrs Obiageli Ezekwesili. These technocrats see the complex world of politics from the narrow, often philistine perspectives of ‘business models’, ‘cost effectiveness’, ‘downsizing’, ‘rightsizing’, ‘efficiency’, etc., as if there is no human cost involved or as if government exists in the context of macroeconomic factors alone. They are very reactionary in ideology, very backward in political terms and are therefore very dangerous to the health of the country, because lacking in any known democratic credentials, they disdain the people and do not have a philosophical or political orientation which places human beings at the heart of the development process. Their charity begins abroad, especially in Washington, the IMF, World Bank, WTO; that is why they are obsessed with ‘ratings’ by imperialist institutions.
This is the context within which we must situate Obiageli Ezekwesili’s ultra-reactionary utterances, her anti-people policies and her gung-ho approach to the management of the public space. As I have argued on this page before, Nigeria and most of the third world, faces the tragedy that those who parade the corridors of power as ‘experts’ or ‘technocrats’ in our countries today are the worst expressions of the defeat of patriotic, anti-imperialist scholarship and activism. They represent the setback which patriotic vision in governance has suffered in the past twenty years or so. How on earth would the Ezekwesili type have surfaced at the times when the liberating thoughts of Murtala Muhammed, Nkrumah, Lumumba, Cabral, Malcolm X, Samora Machel, Frantz Fanon, Nasser, Nyerere, Agustinho Neto, or Thomas Sankara, were ruling the roost in our continent, in our universities or even in our bureaucracy (just compare the patriotic vision which went into the Second and Third National Development Plans with the wishy-washy trash they celebrate as the NEEDS document!)? Mrs Obiageli Ezekwesili is an expression of how backward our society, its political and policy thinking have become, because her ideological ideas are like poison which imperialism has carefully nurtured and cultured to be injected into the nation’s body tissue. They can never lead to the building of a healthy nation; surely but steadily, the nation’s limbs will atrophy and eventually die.
This is why we must fight the battle of ideas about national development with Obiageli Ezekwesili and the tendency she represents in our nation space; we must defeat them decisively at this level.
At another level, we must organise PRACTICALLY to defeat the lunacy of privatisation of unity schools. They were created as institutions of patriotic public education. We must therefore fight for their retention as public unity institutions; they should be properly funded, their decaying infrastructure should be adequately rehabilitated and their philosophical orientation need to be democratically, openly and nationally debated to redirect or reinforce them in the context of the demands of twenfy-first century Nigeria, and the continuing unity of our peoples.
If we allow the unity schools to be privatised, we have all acquiesced in the destruction of an important national institution; they will completely abandon any pretences about a national purpose and join other ‘cash and carry’ private institutions such as Obasanjo’s private university; they will no longer train for patriotic ends but service the narrow needs of transnational capitalist companies in the context of the agenda of neoliberal capitalism. This is not the route that can assist the liberation of the Nigerian people from underdevelopment.
