In the annals of Nigerian history, events in Plateau State have often made some of the more horrific headlines. This proved the case yet again when a two-storey school building belonging to Saints Academy in the Busa-Buji area of Jos, the state capital, collapsed, killing about 22 people and injuring many others including students on 12th July 2024.
As the dust from the collapsed building rose to cloud a stunned country in grief, questions have formed about what safety means in a country of more than 217 million people who are projected to reach 264 million by 2030.
Buildings have freely collapsed in the past to bury helpless and hapless people in rubble. Lagos State, Nigeria's supposed center of excellence, has been an epicenter of collapsed buildings as has Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, which has witnessed many episodes of what is a nightmare for masons who typically escape the squalor of their villages to make a risky living from building in the cities.
With quack contractors who have no qualms about lowering standards, and complicit regulators who have no compunction about looking away when their palms are generously and sufficiently greased, many of those who labor as builders always sit on ticking bombs until everything literally comes down burying them alive.
What have children got to do with it? Why, children who bear in their hearts and faces the light of the future, and project its brilliant image? This question must dig into the understated but undeniable value of education.
At its core, education opposes all forms of deceit especially as it palpably endangers oneself and others. Good education which usually begins from an early age is always all about teaching children what is right and what is wrong. It is largely about equipping children with the resources they need to navigate the difficult path of life. Ethics is perhaps the most important of these resources.
Teaching children right from wrong and telling them the stark and startling difference between responsibility and irresponsibility, morality and immorality, kindness and wickedness, inherently opposes deceit which fuels the darkness suffused in the actions of those who cut corners, alter figures, grease palms and cook the books to gain undue advantage.
According to experts drafted from the University of Jos, the collapse, which a survivor of the collapse described as 'seeing the ground open to swallow them', was as a result of a compromise to the physical integrity of the building. It means substandard materials were used and inferior labor and supervision employed in the building.
To have this tragedy affect children where they were being taught right from wrong is the worst kind of affront to the sensibility of any country. It is a resounding slap on the face of the country and heads should roll, unlikely as it is.
Nigeria gained independence in 1960. The military which shirked its famed discipline many times to spend decades in power finally relinquished power in 1999 from which time Nigeria's democracy has continued to gain some consistency.
Today, Nigerians are unanimous that their country is not where it should be. Nigerians are also in rare agreement that corruption which corrodes good leadership is the force behind many of their problems.
At the root of corruption is willingness to cut corners and cook the books. These take many forms in Nigerians. While bureaucrats often sign away public funds to private accounts, security personnel imperil Nigerians by putting bribes before their bounden duty. At the level of everyday Nigerians, corruption milks minutiae of daily events. The lecturer who asks students to pay to pass with either money or sex, the contractors who use inferior materials to build, and the students who alter their results to gain undue advantages are all complicit.
Nigerians must reflect on the suspect morality that is fast eroding the values on which their country was built. Religion and its paraphernalia are conspicuous in the country but so is
the failure of morality to prescribe an acceptable code of human conduct.
While those who have occupied positions of power in Nigeria must come under the fiercest scrutiny, the fact that they always pooled from Nigerians should provoke a deeper reflection. Since it appears that this pool is fetid, no saints can be found in Nigeria. If children who offer a glimmer of hope that a desperately stranded country can find its course are forced to eat the fruits of corruption right in the place where they are being formed to confront a deep malaise, hope is far away.
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Maybe rubble will finally be the reckoning of a notoriously incorrigible country. But it is doubtful that lessons will be learned in a country where there are many set in their ways who would rather die than allow others live.
The school children, and all those who lost their lives in the tragic incident, deserve to know from wherever they are that building standards in Nigeria are enforced to ensure the safety of the living. The knowledge is the least that can be given to Nigeria's latest victims.
A country where regulatory failures are chronicled in the blood of school children trapped under the rubble of their collapsed school buildings.
