The central locus of Boko Haram’s ideology is an unreflective
aversion to education or, as they like to call it, “western education”—
or “boko”. But in Islam, which Boko Haram ironically claims to be
inspired by, education is not limited by geographic designations. The
prophet of Islam (PBUH) has enjoined Muslims to seek knowledge wherever
it may be. A famous hadith quotes the prophet to have instructed Muslims
thus: “Seek knowledge even if you have to go as far as China, for
seeking knowledge is a duty on every Muslim.”
China, in this quotation, is merely a symbolic referent. The hadith
is basically saying knowledge has no geographic or epistemological
locales. China is one of the farthest distances to Mecca and Medina
where the prophet lived and preached. The prophet’s exhortation to his
adherents to seek knowledge even if it means going to as far a place as
China is a powerful statement of the importance of education to Muslims.
If the West is closer to Arabia than China is, it is ignorant to say
that “western education” is forbidden.
In any case, what we call “western education” today would have been
inconceivable without the contributions of Muslim scholars in the early
part of the 8th century when Europe was sunk in ignorance and
superstition. Muslim scholars pioneered mathematics, a fact that is
evidenced by the reality that the numbers we use in so-called western
education today are Arabic numerals. Science and all forms of complex
calculations would have been impossible with Roman numerals, which the
West used before they encountered Arabic numerals. Muslim scholars also
pioneered the science of astronomy, chemistry, medicine, philosophy,
etc. So so-called Western education is actually a composite of which
Muslim scholarship is an indispensable part.
Muslim scholars of the 8th century studied everything they found from
everywhere. It was they who discovered lost Greek scholarship,
translated it into Arabic, and built on it in many significant ways.
Ironically, Westerners recovered their lost intellectual heritage by
translating Arabic translations of their ancestors’ intellectual
heritage. The works by Thales, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and other
Hellenistic thinkers and philosophers would have been lost forever had
Muslim scholars not found them, translated them, and left them in
libraries. So, it is clear that Boko Haram is not only un-Islamic; it is
scandalously anti-Islamic. Its ideology has no scriptural support in
Islam’s vast theological corpus.
Yobe State governor Ibrahim Gaidam knows this only too well, being a
well-educated man who started out as a classroom teacher and later
became an accountant before venturing into politics. It is this
knowledge that has informed his strategy of fighting Boko Haram with the
arsenal of education. I can’t think of a more effective way to dislodge
this ignorant and murderous anti-Islamic sect in the long term than to
strike at the core of their warped philosophy.
Since Boko Haram’s terror campaign started in Yobe State in 2011, the
governor has intensified his investment in education. For instance, he
has constructed 1,251 classrooms and toilets in different primary
schools across the state at the cost of N1.495 billion. He has also
distributed 1, 111, 808 books and assorted library materials to primary
schools across the state. Realizing that infrastructure is central to
the functioning of educational institutions, he distributed 21, 048
pieces of school furniture to primary schools in the state in addition
to fencing and renovating scores of such schools.
In order to strengthen the pedagogical core of Yobe State’s primary
education, Governor Gaidam drew from his experience as a classroom
teacher and invested a lot of attention on teachers. For example, he has
devoted money for the training of 3,200 English teachers to teach in
the state’s primary schools, and recruited 2,000 NCE teachers for
primary schools. Governor Gaidam is also on record as the first governor
in Nigeria to implement the N18, 000 Minimum Wage for primary school
teachers.
To whom much is given, as the saying goes, much is expected. Given the
renewed favourable attention teachers have received since Alhaji Ibrahim
Gaidam became governor, there is need to also keep watch over their
performance. In this regard, the governor increased the supervisory
capacity of the State Universal Basic Education Commission by providing
them with monitoring vehicles.
Post-primary education received equal attention in the governor’s
“educational” fight against Boko Haram. He has, for instance, renovated
scores of crumbling secondary schools all across the state, and has
undertaken a special renovation and upgrading of six female secondary
schools. Two of these schools are located in each of the state’s three
senatorial districts. They are Government Girls’ Secondary School
Buni-Yadi, Government Girls’ Secondary School Ngelzarma, Government
Girls’ Secondary School Potiskum, Government Girls’ College Damaturu,
Government Girls’ Secondary School Dagona, and Government Girls’
Secondary School Dapchi.
Just like he did for primary schools, the governor also invested both
financial and emotional resources in taking care of secondary school
teachers. He has upped his recruitment drive of teachers, especially
secondary school teachers who can teach science and mathematics, which
have been universally accepted as the engine-rooms of every society’s
technological progress. And, for the first time in Yobe State’s 21 years
as a state, the governor bought and distributed 48 brand new 18-seat
utility vehicles for secondary schools in the state.
Higher education has not received any less attention than primary and
secondary education. From 2007 when the Gaidam administration first
started, over 1.3 billion was spent in scholarships to Yobe State
students studying various courses in the nation’s institutions of higher
learning. Governor Gaidam also initiated a programme to sponsor
exceptional Yobe State indigenes to study a wide spectrum of disciplines
in some of the world’s best universities.
Yobe State made headlines last year when Governor Ibrahim Gaidam
approved scholarships for 12 students from Yobe State –eight of whom
were male and four of whom were female –to study medicine at Russian,
Egyptian and Sudanese universities. As the governor’s spokesman,
Abdullahi Bego, wrote in a Daily Trust article, these students joined
“at least 200 others that the administration had sponsored earlier to
acquire engineering and medical degrees in Turkey, UK, U.S and
Malaysia.” So, while he encouraged domestic higher education, he also
isolated rare talents that could use some foreign training.
The Yobe State University in Damaturu, which had been discontinued
earlier because it lacked basic facilities to operate optimally, has now
been so revamped and equipped that it has been dubbed the ‘fastest
growing university in Northern Nigeria’ by former Ahmadu Bello
University vice chancellor and present Gombe State University vice
chancellor Professor Abdullahi Mahdi. It’s no faint praise for a serving
vice chancellor of a state university to admit that another state
university other than the one he superintends is the fastest growing in a
region where his university is also located.
Some of the immediate effects of the governor’s efforts are that Yobe
State has been transformed from being one of the states with the lowest
school enrollments in the nation to one that has witnessed one of the
fastest school enrollments, according to the CEO of the Universal Basic
Education Commission (UBEC). The state has also improved dramatically in
its yearly performance in WAEC and NECO examinations. It is clear that
many of the “delayed gratifications” of the governor’s efforts won’t
become apparent until several years from now.
In more ways than one, the governor’s obsessive push to put education
in the front burner of Yobe State’s priority isn’t just an effective
long-term strategy against Boko Haram; it is also a wise investment in
the state’s future. Many years from now when the state emerges as one of
the hot spots for technological and scientific growth in Nigeria and
eliminates the scourge of Boko Haram, we would certainly look back to
these years and give credit to one governor’s single-minded
determination to fight ignorance with education. There is certainly a
lot more that the governor can do. Our responsibility as indigenes and
friends of Yobe State is to acknowledge the good work he is doing,
encourage him to continue on this path, and suggest ways for him to
improve on what he is doing.
DailyPost
