The physical structures remained as they were, don’t know what I expected to have changed or why I expected change just because I haven't set eyes on them in 9 days.

The roads, markets, buildings all remained the same- strange but the same; usually bustling roads devoid of cars can’t but look different, markets full of close to over ripe fruits and vegetable sans the bustle haggling customers provide, filling station open but eerily silent, its forecourt devoid of honking cars….strange..but same.

And the intercity car parks that dots the neighbourhood-empty; without cars, without vigour and without life the same but eerily, without the… Agberos — “where are the Agberos”…?

You know, those guys whose value-add is to create a constant din, reminding potential passengers of their locations , running all out after cars they suspect conveys potential passengers, dragging anything that faintly resembles a travelling bag out of passer’s by hands to lure them into the parks… the literal life of the park - where are they..?, what are they doing..?, how are they coping in a climate of economic desolation…?…what are they and others like them doing..? how do the plan to cope…?

The well being of the members of the buy-in-bulk, well clothed and cloistered class, depends more than we can imagine on the answers to these questions that aren’t as innocuous as the sound…

TEACHERS IN THE LAND OF THE CROCODILE

Twittersphere where I spend quite a lot of my time (unhealthily)chirped throughout this week on the issue of the Kaduna state Teachers failing competency tests designed for primary 4 pupils. This is definitely an issue beyond the brevity the even now 280 character can allow.

Where ever one stand in this issue; being a proponent or opponent of this decision, passionate or paid what has being missing is the acknowledgement that this is the first official realisation and attempt to grapple with one of the chickens of our past (in)actions coming home to roost, of the very many our political leaders would have to deal with within an almost overwhelming frequency for the next few years and way these issues are dealt with will determine the nature of problems our society would have to grapple with in future.

Most of the passion has rightly been about the disgraceful quality of the teachers but these are just 2nd or 3rd order issues; symptoms of much deeper malaise that hints at a rot deep inside our system that we've refused to exorcise while pretending that all is well and not beyond the powers of an occasional analgesic.

I once deeply believed in a theory taught by a project management instructor who said bureaucracies are too focused on self preservation and therefore actively seeks to allow just enough competent hands into the system to protect the majority who treat it as a sinecure for the politically connected and ethnically fortunate.

It however seems that the Kaduna State bureaucracy failed this simply test and voted for self immolation years ago by allowing themselves be over run by the incompetent, so overwhelmingly that they are just not enough good teachers to act as anything but ineffectual fig leaves to protect them from the infamy any crusading political master will seek to paint them as, in order to push an agenda no matter how benign or malign.

Max weber once described some of the characteristics of bureaucracies to include, inter alia;

• Officials with expert training in their fields.
• Career advancement dependent on technical qualifications.
• Qualifications evaluated by organisational rules not individuals.

Now if we agree as we must in face of published evidence that these teachers aren't supposed to be anywhere close to being teachers we have to be forced to agree that apart from the kaduna state bureaucracy, being a hierarchical organisation with a formal chain of command they fail in other areas of being called a bureaucracy according to the parameters listed above.

Before actions leading to sustainable solutions can be found, we need to ask and answer questions that risks tying ourselves up in knots or lead to paralysis from analysis. Questions, such as, who employed these teachers..? based on what parameters and by whom were their competencies judged at the point of entry…? why were the rules not obviously followed in the recruitment and career advancement of these teachers…? Will this same bureaucracy be trusted to oversee the recruitment of the new teachers…? if the bureaucracy can indeed function optimally under a stern benign eye of the present political master what happens when this eye is distracted or is replaced by a less exacting type, keeping in mind the stated aim for this kerfuffle is about enshrining a process that will guarantee that our kids are adequately equipped to navigate the challenges of the future and not a seed offering for the benefit of the next 4 years political cycle. Most scary of all, does this same bureaucracy oversee other critical sectors such as health,enonomic planning, defence…too scary to contemplate so lets limit our scope to the teachers.

Next problem I see, the failed teachers being rightfully shown the way out are certified products of our educational system, admittedly (hopefully) the worst of it, but still products, as we've not been informed of any cases of forged certificates. This lamentable state is a consequence of decisions we (un)consciously took starting in the 1980s to de- prioritise education, epitomized by reduced funding , made worse by the ASSU lead and middle class complicit ploy to conflate education in its totality with Tertiary education resulting in most of the available scarce funding going to the tertiary sector. This state of affairs is made even worse by our collective decision to obstinately refuse to understand the zero sum nature of oppurtunity costs leading to a lack of husbanding of available funding and proceed as if funding is still at its optimum (NYSC anyone).

These choices or lack of has transformed public sector eduction at almost all tiers into a conveyor belt leading to a series of holding pens where the requisite quality assurance process education should provide doesn't work and makes the products not credible as these teachers have shown. Will it be products of this same system the teachers replacement will come from..?

Before we throw our hands up in the air and say our problems are intractable and resort to our default setting of despairing in our negative exceptionalism. I will like to assure you that there are hardly any country in the world today that didn't need to grapple with these issues at one point or the other in their history. The difference is that they recognised the deep and multi-dependent nature of systems and fashioned a path for lasting and sustainable change, that’s why they’re the success they are today and validated by the massive wealth transfer we as a nation indulges in by sending those that can afford it to acquire education there.

What they didn't do or what they've realised after passage of time was the futility and inefficiency cost wise band aid solutions. We should be wise to consult the rich literature that documents these efforts.

I’d rather see this as an opportunity for us to take a deep breadth to think things through, proceed with caution and design holistic programmes that will be unpopularly gradualist and effective. Solutions that are rash dictated by the election calender are doomed to not only fail but is guaranteed to leave us in a place worse off than whence we started. With a more bloated work force to bear after politics inevitably demands that those let go constitutes too much of a valuable voting block that out weights their incompetence and are reabsorbed back into the system to applause by same us…

Read your article with pleasure, it was logical and the facts incontrovertible till I got to the conclusion which I read with so much alarm its only right I pen this rejoinder.

You sir are not allowed to give in to despair, No, not at all; thats the pleasure reserved for we the younger Ones behind you.

Not you sir, the grizzled silver back.

Nature is not as efficient and needs time, Time especially to completely eliminate (un) desirable traits. Between this time and its inefficiency, enough of these “hardy” people has survived and thriving (Just) within the hostile eco system.

Ideas, arguments and lamentations flowing back to forth on various fronts, Twitter, facebook, whatsapp forums, Newspaper vendor stands and one or two whispered words I dare say within the National Assembly, evidence of this survival.

No sane person can not but look at the immediate future with a trepidation that makes crossing the Sahara to drown in the Mediterranean an attractive option but stirrings and rumblings all around tempers this option and colours the future at least in the medium term with optimism.

The dying pangs of the Oil era which enforced our destructive behavioral pattern is coming to an end; the most dim of us is even beginning to ask question dared not asked a short while back. A seismic shift is coming awaiting these endangered hardy survivors to take charge.

The far future is coming sooner than we think and it can be anything we make it to be if only we can just start now.

Your mission sir, is to seek these hardy specimens out, inspire them, nurture them, organise them, arm them with a sense of good , the truth, the real truth not the ambiguous ones the society currently enforces; for the coming earthquake.

For it is coming and can only be seized by the prepared or it will be lost to those that seek power for its sake then Darwin’s nature will then have all the time to do its work.

This sir is your mission.

https://twitter.com/DrJoeAbah/status/787743220478439424

Dr Abah’s tweets are difficult to question as they are usually well thought out (did I mention relentlessly polite and upbeat). My immediate reaction was to direct him to Napoleon Bonaparte maxim; “ a constitution should be short and obtuse” for it to be timeless.

Now does our constitution meets this criteria; it is 119 pages; with issues requiring vagueness, inflexibly explicit (listing of LGAs), and where explicitness is needed maddening vague (the whole State of Origin/ settler/indigene issue) and issues that have no reasons at all to be in the constitution i.e Land use Act which makes nonsense of all the urban planning and housing laws not to talk about holding hostage an entire factor of production; are included.

His intervention would however be a missed opportunity if limited to this direct reply and not expanded to encompass the breadth of issues that makes this constitution self contradiction inevitable; The absence of a “National Consensus”. (Please don't roll your eyes with the thought that a ‘True Federation’ fanatic is on the prowl).

But the absolute truth is no nation can experience genuine progress without a consensus. This can evolve unconsciously, formally through conferences or even by force imposed on all by a wining party after a civil war, period of dictatorship etc.

China is a good example; Growth and external force projection only started accelerating after the crushing of the Tainanmen Square protest of 1989, this laid to rest once and for all the nature of political system and social direction debate that have raged at times quietly or vociferously since the 1970s.

An even better example is the United Kingdom which has a yet to be fully deciphered system of thinking up and implementing peaceful drastic changes only possible by violent revolutions in other countries. Their present welfare state, which the applauded NHS was an offshot off, was implemented by the labour party in 1948 but the consensus for this obviously socialist policies was arrived out and articulated by the 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report). Debates in favour of which, had already taken place and agreed upon by all the ideological hues of British society hence it was easy for the Labour party to give it life by enacting the necessary legislations without obvious obstruction by the conservative party on ideological grounds.

Closer home a single issue we all believe (rightly or wrongly) is holding us back; corruption, is being waged in an apparent shambolic manner because there’s no consensus on its definition, roles of various arms of government in the fight and expected sanctions/outcomes, despite close unanimity on its negative impact on the society.

A national consensus will also automatically create a cohort of multi-ethnic, multi-creed and multi-gender class of true believers, that will advance the course of governance as most of government programs stops being party/ethnic /class based but national agendas.

So back to @DrJoeAbah; there’s a need for a consensus before a constitution, for a constitution only codifies what has been agreed upon otherwise the result will be a document as contradictory as our current foreign exchange policy.

So what’s not to like I hear you say, well, this person (who we should allow to remain nameless) also has terrible communication skills with a terrible command of English language made worse by a stuttering style of delivery (a step above incoherent). Lacks the ability to work unsupervised for even the simplest of tasks thereby sucking up scarce resources to oversee his work, very patchy mastery of area of his core competency, struggling through the most basic of task, all these made a lot worse by his lack of improvement in all areas especially when put against the amount of knowledge, time,effort and intensity of supervision and tutelage invested in him.

So what to do; is it a problem of investing more time and effort trying to decipher what the reason is for this apparent lack of progress or just cut my looses by looking for someone else with the same positives and a lot less of the negatives….?