“If your plan is for one year, plant rice; if your plan is for ten years, plant trees; if your plan is for one hundred years, educate children” – Guan Yiwu.
THIS quote from Guan Yiwu, an earlier statesman and thinker who lived from about 720 BC to 645 BC, is often wrongly attributed to Confucius. The original quote roughly translates to: “The best ten-year plan is to plant trees; the best plan for the rest of your life is to plant people.”
When taken further, the allusion to planting rice represents the short term; tree planting symbolises long-term investments as trees take a long time to mature. Educating children is all about lasting impact and shaping future generations. Therefore, it is a worthy investment that equips individuals with knowledge, skills, and values that can transform society positively over the long term, come rain or shine.
Education is the only tool known to extricate people and nations from poverty, catapulting them into a class they would only dream of without it. It is also the only antidote against those who want to press you to the ground – those hell-bent on destroying a people, a nation or a legacy.
Iran is a good example. The United States of America and Europe have imposed all manner of sanctions on the nation with the sole purpose of bringing it to its knees. However, the nation’s leaders gave everything to the education of their people. While the country may not consistently rank in the top 10 globally, it performs well in certain areas and among specific groups of countries. It ranks second among D-8 countries in terms of the number of universities.
Additionally, Iran is strong in the Young University Rankings, coming third among the featured nations. In some subject areas, like Computer Science and Engineering, Iranian universities like Sharif University of Technology and the University of Tehran are highly rated.
One can see this not only in the recently concluded “12-Day War” in which Iran not only stood eyeball to eyeball against two nuclear powers, America and Israel, inflicting unprecedented and hitherto unimaginable damage on them, but showcased its highly developed missile technology, despite being taken unawares in the war.
Iran has been at the forefront in research, making inroads and discoveries in medicine, space science, communications and many other fields.
With this in mind, Yobe State’s efforts to provide qualitative education to contribute to the future development of its youths, the state, and, by extension, the nation should command some attention.
Three of its girls, Nafisa Abdullahi Aminu, Ruqayya Muhammad Fema, and Hadiza Kashim Kalli, went to a non-government-sponsored English Language-based competition in the United Kingdom and shone like a million stars, dusting about 20,000 other participants from 69 different nations. The beauty of it is not even in the high number of students involved in the competition; the competition was multinational, and participating countries sent their champions.
The state government sponsored the students to the competition – TeenEagle Global English Championship, organised by a UK-based non-governmental organisation (NGO). However, competition does not have to be organised by governments to be authentic; whoever wins deserves their accolades.
But, unfortunately, in Nigeria, some people have little regard for anything positive associated with others other than themselves. They will not celebrate you in your time of happiness. They will, instead, turn up their noses when you have achieved glory just because you are not of the same region or religion (again, those two demons buffeting our society) or belong to different political platforms. And so, they will disparage you and demean your achievements – just for the sadistic fun of it.
But if we genuinely want to develop as a nation, we must learn to accommodate one another, love and respect one another, have one another’s back, hold the hands of our weakest links and haul them up so that we breast the tape together.
In terms of history, Yobe is like a toddler. When a toddler begins to walk, people clap and encourage them as they take faltering steps. The state is the first, albeit from the rear, in almost all aspects of the human development index in Nigeria.
It is in recognition of its deficiencies in education and its toddler status that the state governor, Mai Mala Buni, declared a state of emergency in education, going on to launch an appeal fund to complement the government’s efforts in boosting education.
Since then, his government has built many well-equipped schools, paid scholarships and sponsored academic and medical research (especially relating to kidney diseases that have become worrisome in the state) that would benefit the entire nation. For any national and global competitions in which Yobe State students can participate, the governor makes sure they are sponsored to take part.
Even though coming home with glory is desirable to him, Governor Buni say his primary interest is for the young minds to see other parts of the world and intermingle with those who live there, compare their knowledge with their peers, learn new techniques, gain confidence, establish global network for the future and return with broader vision and the belief that they can conquer the world.
He has also made education at home cheap by subsidising registration for students in the state’s tertiary institutions. Yobe State University is very affordable when compared to universities in other states. He recently bent backwards, despite provocations and unreasonable demands, to broker peace in the Yobe State University so that lectures can resume in earnest. All these efforts have not been for nothing, as we see them reflected in the three girls.
For the three young girls, all students of TULIP or Turkish College in Yobe, not only your state but also the entire nation must be proud of you. We must also not forget that their feat was possible because the late Governor Mamman B. Ali had the vision to set up the school, and Governor Buni has the will to provide whatever is needed for its maintenance.
Therefore, from where they are coming, Yobe State and its three girls need understanding, encouragement, and support from Nigeria and Nigerians. We should be all-for-one and one-for-all. Ultimately, it is Nigeria that matters, and only well-educated people can take our nation to where it matters.
- Dr Gimba, anipr, is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Neptune Prime. His syndicated column, The Arbiter, appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Mondays.