Experts have said that every child born of Nigeria has the right to free education.
This they said at the Association of Nigeria Authors (ANA) monthly reading and dialogue held in Abuja.
A Nigerian poet and polemicist, Odia Ofeimun, said every president in Nigeria should subscribe to the idea of free education for Nigerian children.
He said, “Because in my study of human development, whether in economy or political science classes, I had come to agree that the societies who give free education are more likely to be developed society than others.
“The Chinese today are outstripping the Americans because America is making it difficult; you need to be dripping blood from your body in order to get something good, even in education.
“But you see what Chinese have done is that by keeping the ground level, every child is in a position to contribute to what can wipe out whatever difficulties in the society. They do not have to be supported by state in order to think. As long as they can think, they can outstrip whatever any state affair might put in their way.
“If you are giving a society of 400 farmers and you turn all of them into educated people and you have a sense of technology that can enable every member of that society to contribute to it, they dominate any society. What our leaders are doing by not giving education the kind of outstanding responsibilities that we should do in our society is that they are impoverishing every one of us.
“If you produce two bars of clothes every day and you train one person to do what 200 can do, you do not need to go to the society and worry because you already know the society is already in front and it will remain in front; which is why the Chinese are building roads over water everywhere.”
Odia noted that America got the technology before Chinese but Chinese will continue to outstrip them because the Chinese give the empowerment to virtual every member of their society.
“Think of the population of 250 million people, each of them is producing as they should, Nigeria will take care of the whole of Africa,” he said.
Meanwhile, distinguished scholar Prof Udenta O. Udenta said that Nigeria is a great nation with enormous oil and gas deposits yet no meaningful development.
He said, “Oil, as a natural gift, is by necessity something that can inspire development but there is something called resource curse because of the resources in Africa.
“DR Congo (DRC) is potentially the richest in terms of natural endowment to control the world but it is the most impoverished with poverty, crisis, anarchy, and so on ravishing the land.
“Our own dear Nigeria is a great nation with enormous oil resources and gas deposits, and yet we find Boko Haram in the Northeast, terrorist groups in the Northwest and even in the North Central, even FCT is not safe; series of agitation in the South East, Niger Delta agitating for the resource control and even Yoruba movement in the South West in the midst of billions of resources.
The chairman, Association of Nigeria Authors (ANA), Abuja Chapter, Chukwudi Eze said that as a Nigerians we should celebrate who we are.
“I can tell you that without Nigeria occupying the space in global geopolitics, Africa is threatened.
“Nigeria can attain that position but for us to do that we must come together and unite. We can only come together to attain our purpose so that the black people can look at us and feel they are going somewhere,” he said.
