MY CONCERNS ABOUT THE STATE OF NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES: A university is a place of enquiry and enlightenment but every year, impressionable young minds arrive on our university campuses hoping to be nurtured in the art and science of enquiry, the tool by which all progressive societies have advanced themselves; but instead, a great percentage of their university time is taken up by religious activities such as prayer meetings, night vigils, evangelism, crusades and so on, the result of which is that our universities effectively become places for nurturing religious beliefs, superstitions and other fantastical ideas. Every year, our universities graduate people who teach and/or think that prayers can cure diseases, move the economy forward, fix our bad roads, choose good leaders and so on. Rather than spend money on laboratories and research our governments, persuaded by the belief in the efficacy of prayers, choose to build mosques and churches, and sponsor pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem. The cure for malaria is in the laboratory, not mosques or churches. Some of our best minds abandon their original degrees and become peddlers of false hope enriching themselves in the process. If they lived up to their function since our independence from colonial rule, by now, one would expect our universities would have churned out generations of youth who are sceptics and critical thinkers. Sadly, that is not the case. Instead, we have science graduates who believe that cars can run on empty tanks (recall Pastor Adeboye and his famed journey from Ore to Lagos on an empty tank); that prayers routinely cure patients of diseases such as cancer, stroke, diabetes, Ebola, HIV/AIDS; that prayers can even resurrect the dead; that university examinations can be passed by anointing books, pencils, pens and other reading/writing material with holy water, olive oil or handkerchiefs. These should concern everyone who cares about the progress of Nigeria, but also of Africa and of blacks in general. Superstitions will never get us anywhere productive. Make no mistakes, it will take a long while to reverse the damage as even university lecturers hold these beliefs and see no problem in openly declaring them!! By: Ijabla Raymond
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 19:37:02 +0000
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