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A Nigerian student
in the UK, being pushed to get the high examination grades required to
enter Oxbridge Universities, protested that all her subject teachers at
school were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge.

“What is the point
of working so hard to get there if you are only going to be a teacher?”
she said. At first, the adult relating the story to me agreed with the
teenager that ending up as a teacher after working so hard, and having
one’s parents pay so much to send their child to one of the premier
universities in the world, was a failure.

The same theme is
echoed in the 2009 film, “an education” where the lead character’s
education is salvaged by a female teacher whom she had previously
sneered at for her lack of ambition and achievement after being one of
the first set of women to attend university.

However, isn’t the
point that it should be our brightest minds who train, educate, advise
and groom our citizens and leaders? Would you choose an unintelligent
teacher to help your child pass his or her exams?

The real tragedy is
that we are the ones who have decided that it is ok if the people who
rule us did not work hard for good grades at school, have never held
down a real job or run a business successfully.

Reading extracts
from Plato’s ‘The Republic’ and Khaldun’s ‘The Muqaddimah’ about how
their societies selected their leaders and the criteria for
appointment, I was struck by how truly backward we are. By backward, I
mean we are doing things backwards instead of forwards. We are
regressing instead of progressing.

Plato is a Greek
Philosopher who lived in 400 BC (before Christ). Khaldun is a Tunisian
historian who wrote mostly in the late 1300s. In their days, only the
brightest minds, with a source of income could be leaders. Plato picked
men who could observe the world as philosophers do, analyse it and plan
how to flourish within it as spiritual, rational and physical beings.

For Khaldun,
leaders had to be members of the aristocracy, men of virtue, religion,
education, liberality, bravery and nobility. In addition, he had to be
just, and not compete with his citizens in farming or trade.

The brightest
brains, of whom we have plenty in Nigeria, have also made some
decisions for themselves. They have decided that they are not eligible
to rule because they do not want to steal or keep company with thieves.
They have decided to make their fortunes in business, eke a basic
living in academics or else emigrate to a society where the
appreciation for the value the brightest brains can bring already
exists.

Of course, there is
the odd exception who decides to do the right thing; but because we
don’t like the package the message comes in, we just humour them, hail
them and pass them by on the well travelled road to destruction,
despair and oblivion.

Others say that
calls for the brightest brains are just calls for the “elite” to take
power. I beg to disagree. If there is one thing you can say about
Nigeria it is that our elite are not a fixed demographic group.
Membership of a social class changes as your circumstances change, and
there is opportunity for everyone in their individual efforts.

Memo to the bright

What people
confuse with the elite are the privileged. But many people from
privileged homes are not members of any elite groups other than the
social recreational clubs their parents and grandparents formed. So
this is not about the elite. This is about having real criteria for our
leaders and rulers, and grooming them through our best teachers and
advisers.

Dear ‘brightest
brains’, show us that you also have common sense and logic. Prove to us
that the people who invested their time, love and money in your care
and training to make a leader out of you did not waste their time.

For goodness sake,
for God’s sake, for your sake, step up to be identified, elected and
appointed to rule us. Step forward to challenge and prevent the
ineligible from leading us. Step out from the tiny haven of calm and
productivity that you have created as your world, and fight to expand
it to benefit more people, and then step back to find and drag out
other bright minds to join you in creating a critical mass that can
make positive change happen.

Dear ‘not so
bright minds’ but right-thinking people, you know who should really be
in leadership positions. Prod them, disturb them, encourage them, support them, protect them, and guide them to lead us right.

Lastly, is this a sensible society where our teachers, who work in
hot, ill-equipped and over-populated classrooms earn N1 million a year
if they are lucky; and where our senators who sit in air conditioned
rooms to pass only one new law per session, earn N300 million per annum?