In his famous work, The Republic, the Greek Thinker, Plato (428/427 or 424/423 BC -348/347 BC) banishes the Poet from his Ideal State because, in the great thinker’s estimation, the Artist’s “creations have an inferior degree of truth,” he is “concerned with an inferior part of the soul;” “he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason;” “implants an evil constitution;” “indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small” and for being “a manufacturer of images” that “is very far removed from the truth.”
Plato’s denunciation of the Artist and his arts has had many followers over the Millennia since he penned it, and President Muhammadu Buhari appears to be one of them. In his budget brief before the National Assembly last Tuesday, the President declared “free education for science, technology and education students in tertiary institutions.”
By omitting the Humanities out of this otherwise laudable free tertiary education policy, however, President Buhari and his cabinet have failed to grasp a fundamental reason for Nigeria’s post-Independence anomies – failure to ingrain humanist ideals in the collective psyche of the citizenry, which any study in the Humanities should deposit in its students as guiding lights of the pupils’ post-formal education endeavours, public or private.
We are tempted to excuse President Buhari for this grave error of judgment, after all the President is only a trained military man and there are still many supposedly educated people, even professors, who cannot fathom why the Humanities are studied in the universities! To the platonic, arts and the artist are mere Alawada (jesters or dimwit), as Prof. Femi Osofisan, in his inaugural lecture, “Insidious Treason: Drama in a Postcolonial State, says many dismissively threw the way of staff and students of the Department of Drama, University of Ibadan, when rehearsals or even theatrical performances were mounted at that famous patch of UI.
However, it is telling that a President who only recently paid glowing tributes to musicians for their invaluable contribution to his election would leave out future musicians training in the few Departments of Music across Nigerian universities in his free education largess.
If poets who set their poetry to music – Musicians – helped crowned the President as he had acknowledged, that could not be all they are capable of. By a stretch of logic, the Artist, the Humanities essentially, must be indispensable to bringing about the change President Buhari promised Nigeria.
By excluding students of Humanities from enjoying free education, President Buhari sends a strong signal that the Arts and the artistic do not matter in his vision of a new Nigeria, and dispensed off a veritable tool to nation-building, which advanced countries that Nigeria aspires to catch up with have used and are still using to move forward. Change is impossible in society without the inputs of the Arts and the artistic.
Humanities Studies are essentially the examination of the Human Condition in all possible ramifications. The sole aim of all responsible governments is to change the human condition they find their citizens in, for the better. The first step towards changing any situation or condition is to understand it.
The Arts tends to communicate the human condition and remedies mainly through metaphor and poetics. Science communicates through logic and mathematics. However, both disciplines seek to foster and produce creative and innovative problem solvers.
Clearly, Science and the Arts naturally overlap, feeding each other for the advancement of the human race. Over thousands of years, the Myth of Icarus fired the imaginations of Mankind to take to the skies, until the Wright Brothers achieved it for Humanity.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tells a cautionary tale of the dangers that unbridled and unethical scientific experiment or technological invention pose to the human race. More than 100 years after Shelley wrote that seminal novel, it looms large over ethical debates in scientific circles, especially in new frontier medical sciences like cloning and genetic engineering.
Throughout history, greatest inventors and scientists have merged scientific knowledge and discovery with artistic creativity. Einstein studied the piano and violin as a child. When he had troubles with a scientific theory, he would strike a few chords on the piano or pick up the violin and play, and that would often free up a constructive thought or solution.
Technology companies don’t come bigger than Apple Incorporated. In 2010, while introducing the iPad, co-founder of Apple, the late Steve Jobs, said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”
A rounded and ingrained humanistic education produces citizens with strong disposition to working for the greater good of the greater number. The advanced countries of the world know this and pursue it vigorously as they build their nations.
An education, formal or informal, without humanistic inputs would only produce enlightened, uncompassionate, self-centred brutes, who, as national security chiefs, would rather steal funds than buy bullets for their troops in a war situation. It is the medical personnel unschooled in the Humanities who will demand a police report before attending to a gunshot victim. And national or state budget drafters unexposed to the elevated thoughts of humanistic education would be blind to the human cost of budget cuts and overhead reduction achieved by “right-sizing” the workforce; they would know the price of everything and the value of nothing, to paraphrase the famous artist-wit, Oscar Wilde.
Countries and Companies that want to stay globally competitive know that they need employees who are multi-disciplinary and creative thinkers who are able collaborate with other team members. Those qualities are at the heart of staging a play or performing in a jazz quartet. Like the liberal arts in general, training in the arts improves the ability to pull together and synthesize seemingly disparate ideas and information into a coherent and meaningful whole.
It must be said, however, that the current crop of Nigerian academics in our faculties of arts have done little in the public space to educate the nation on the practical, every-day, real life values of the Humanities. Ensconced in their insular world, they appear unbothered or incapable of impeaching the fallacy that the intellectual firepower in the universities is in the sciences. This is a great disservice to the world-famous achievements of the first generation of Nigerian academics in the Arts, including Africa’s first Nobel Prize in Literature received by Prof. Wole Soyinka in 1986.
Where are today’s Bala Usmans of the famous Department of History, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria? Is there any town-and-gown collaboration forged by our artists-scholar anywhere in Nigeria today in the mould of the famous Mbari Club of the 1960s at UI? What work of fiction – novel, poem or play – has of recent emanated from our faculties of arts telling of the tragic human condition in Nigeria today as was the fine tradition of the first generation Nigerian academics in the humanities? How many doctoral theses in the library of any department in our faculties of art today address a real-life problem in the country, in clear, accessible language and not some highfaluting, obscurantist literary lingo?
While President Buhari’s science and technology vision might be commendable, he must not leave the Humanities behind in his quest to build a new Nigeria. To be sure, the Arts sector is capable of galvanising a national rebirth.
No developing nation should price out the masses out of higher education as it is today in Nigeria. We suggest that the President extend his free tertiary education to all faculties in our universities. We also recommend that he demands that federal universities contribute to the nation-building process beyond merely churning out graduates into the saturated job market.
Each federal university should set up a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) team – at no extra budgetary cost. The mandate of the STEAM panel is to establish a town-and-gown synergy between the university and the larger society, with a view to solving real-life problems plaguing our nation and generating revenue for the federation accounts.
State government must also adopt this policy in their universities to increase internally generated revenues (IGR).
There is no reason for the STEAM policy to fail. In 2012, Ogun State Governor, Ibikunle Amosun, claimed the state could no longer fund the Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED), Ijebu Ode, and scrapped it. Although that decision was eventually reversed, TASUED has since then largely funded its operations with its own IGR, as Governor Amosun’s subvention to the institution remains spasmodic till date.
As the Federal Government looks for funds to implement the 2016 budget, the Arts and Culture sector is an untapped goldmine that could contribute billions of naira to the national purse, if creatively and vigorously handled. President Buhari should mandate the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Muhammed, to generate amble revenue for the country in the Arts and Culture sector.
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