If the 19th Century English scholar and politician, John Dalberg-Acton, is right in his popular saying that, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” then it follows that powerlessness frustrates, and absolute powerlessness frustrates absolutely. This conjecture explains the situation in which a lot of Nigerians found themselves when President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government took the highly unpopular educational policy decision to remove the academic subject of History from the curricula of primary and secondary schools in 2007. Collaboratively, Umaru Yar’Adua’s administration implemented the vexatious policy decision in 2009, and despite the hue and cry, Goodluck Jonathan’s government did nothing to reverse it. Efforts were however made by Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to reintroduce the subject to the schools’ curricula in 2018, but the results of those efforts were yet to be seen six years later, thus heightening the attendant frustrations of Nigerians.
Ostensibly, the government’s decision to remove History from the schools’ curricula was based on the following reasons: avoidance of the subject by students; dearth of qualified teachers; limited job prospects for graduates of the subject; and students’ preference for the supposed alternative subject of Civics. Plausible as some of the reasons might have been, condemnations trailed the policy decision as many critics expressed palpable bitterness at the refusal of successive administrations to address the issue. The Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka, was at the forefront. Hear him: “History is so fundamental to self knowledge, to identity, to understanding where you came from and therefore where you might be headed … So, how can a subject like History be excised from the curriculum of any school? Can you imagine that? History? What is wrong with history? Or maybe I should ask, what is wrong with some people’s head?”
As often happens in Nigeria’s policy environment, controversy dogged the removal of History from the schools’ curricula, with top government functionaries (including the education ministers) refusing to own up to the removal decision. Specifically, President Obasanjo’s education minister, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, who oversaw the policy introduction in 2007, vehemently denied having anything to do with it, arguing that the decision dates back to 1982 when the country adopted the 6-3-3-4 system of education. According to her, that was when History was officially removed as a stand-alone subject from the curricula of primary schools and the newly introduced Junior Secondary Schools (JSS), and it was then replaced with Social Studies and Civics respectively.
There may have been some element of truth in Mrs Ezekwesili’s claims, but critics continued to assail her for not envisioning the importance of a reversal of the obnoxious policy decision during her ministerial tenure. Again, the Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka, spearheaded the attacks: “A lot of crime is done to our children and our advancement. It’s questionable that these things happen, and we allow them to go on for so long that our children grow up intellectually truncated … A huge part of their brain is unused because certain facts are not available to them. They do not even know where the existence begins. I won’t say more than that because each time I think of it, honestly, I want to go look for that minister and strangle him or her. I have no idea who it was.”
Against this backdrop, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 2024 year-end decision to reintroduce History to the country’s primary and secondary school curricula is being greeted with loud applause from various segments of the Nigerian populace. Even though the country is presently experiencing unprecedented hardship occasioned by his socioeconomic policies and programmes, the jubilant folks maintain that the President is not insensitive to the popular yearnings and aspirations of Nigerians as shown in his decision, which was conveyed to the public on December 31, 2024, by the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa: “President Tinubu has given the directive for the return of History as a subject in primary and secondary schools from the year 2025 … The President has mandated that we put that back in our curriculum and that is back. From 2025, our students in primary and secondary schools will have that as part of their studies.”
Unsurprisingly, the Nigerian media space is aglow with approbations for President Tinubu’s decision, apparently due to the negative consequences of the 14-year absence of History from the country’s lower-level education curricula. The Minister for Education, Dr. Alausa, corroborated this view in course of his announcement: “Let me go to basic education, the curriculum is good. What has been missing in the past is Nigerian history. We now have people of 30 years disconnected from our history. It doesn’t happen in any part of the world …” And truly, the minister’s observation is germane. For, a lot of present-day Nigerian youths are bereft of a sense of appreciation in terms of their country’s past. Many are abysmally ignorant of its shared socio-cultural identities and values that serve to foster national unity and patriotism.
This anomaly is most noticeable in the public interactions of the youths, especially on social media platforms where they are at liberty to give free rein to their thoughts. Many spew incomprehensible infantile falsehoods and outright fabrications as they heighten fake-news and conspiracy theories to the point of ridicule. For instance, one self-styled “Influencer” on Meta Platform (Facebook) recently claimed that all the nationalists who led Nigeria to her Independence in 1960 were “killed” in the country’s first military coup of January 1966. Another, who labelled himself a “Pan-Africanist,” maintained that Idi Amin, the murderous tyrant responsible for the death and disappearance of an estimated 500,000 Ugandans, is the “father of African nationalism.”
Undoubtedly, incalculable harm has been done to the Nigerian society due to the absence of History from the elementary and secondary schools’ curricula. And the situation was not helped by the fact that the subjects of Social Studies and Civics, which were expected to serve as viable alternatives, proved highly inadequate as they are much more limited in scope. While Civics focuses essentially on the principles of government and other institutions of the state, History understudies the politico-economic and socio-cultural milieu in which the state institutions and the citizenry operate.
Ironically, there is a tendency for global scholarship to undervalue History as an academic subject. Perhaps, this stems from its elementary definition as “The record of past events,” which serves to portray it as nothing more than a chronicle of past occurrences. And it is in this elementary light that the subject is viewed in many developing countries, especially in Third World states like Nigeria, where its university graduates are considered unmarketable in comparison to those of some disciplines like medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and law. It also explains why many universities in the country have ceased to offer History as a stand-alone discipline, merging it with other courses like International Affairs, International Diplomacy, Strategic Studies, etc.
In realistic terms, History is an all-encompassing academic discipline. It entails the study of nearly all earthly phenomena. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, it focuses on specific time-periods in the growth and development of a phenomenon. Borrowing from mathematics, the physical and applied sciences, arts, humanities, and the social sciences, it uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events with a view to unravelling their causes and effects, thus predicting their future impacts. In essence, History examines historical events and the human motives behind them through the synthesization of their causes and consequences – a dialectical process that Marxian scholars gleefully refer to as: “The negation of the negation.”
Generally, it is accepted that knowledge acquisition is incremental and cumulative. Hence, a Nigerian History enthusiast would be interested in the origins, growth, and development of his country. Thus, he would like to know why the forces that shaped its anti-colonial struggle began to unravel immediately after Independence in 1960, culminating in the intervention of the military in its political process in 1966 – a situation that subsequently degenerated into the bloody Nigerian-Biafra Civil War of 1967 – 1970. In the same vein, he would be interested in understanding the role of opportunistic military predators in the underdevelopment of his country, just as their counterparts did in many other African countries. Moreso, he would be interested in knowing why the legacy of lawlessness, corruption, and unbridled treasury-looting bequeathed by the rapacious military juntas continue to linger in Nigeria and other African states even as they have transitioned to democratic rule.
At the global level, any Nigerian enthusiast of History would show interest in the following and much more: The brutal and barbaric Arab Slave Trade of the 7th – 19th Century, and the European Trans-Atlantic version of the 15th – 19th Century; European colonialism in Africa; African nationalism and the struggle for independence; the colonial policy of divide-and-rule that exacerbated ethnic tensions in Independent African states and precipitated bloody civil wars, as exemplified by the Congo (DRC); the 1st and 2nd World Wars, and the Cold War that came to an end in 1991, giving rise to the forces of religious bigotry, ethnocentrism, banal nationalism and irredentism, which are now fueling all sorts of violent conflicts across the globe.
In May 2019, at a related public forum, the Nobel Laureate, Soyinka, who has received copious mention in this piece, reportedly said: “The importance of history is not just as an academic exercise, it is a development exercise, it is life.” Interestingly, some people have interpreted life, and its purpose as follows: the quest for happiness through the acquisition of wisdom and knowledge, to condition the mind towards the avoidance of suffering, which is usually caused by ignorance. This is where History, either as an academic exercise or an abstraction, comes in for appreciation. And, it is in this wise that President Tinubu’s administration rightly deserves high marks for reintroducing the subject to the curricula of primary and secondary schools in Nigeria.
Dennis Onakinor writes from Lagos – Nigeria. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]