SAN FRANCISCO, July 04, (THEWILL) – The Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, on Tuesday blamed successive poor leadership being experienced in the country on the abolition of the study of History from the nation’s school curriculum.
Speaking in Abuja at the public presentation of a book entitled: ‘The First Regular Combatant: Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari, OFR’, he said the removal of History subject impacted negatively on students as it denied them the opportunity to know their past, present and future.
Represented by the Minister of Water Resources, Sulaiman Adamu, he said the Nigerian landscape had been disfigured by appalling examples of poor leadership and bad governance because the youths were misled into feeling that there was total absence of idealism and heroism in the country.
Osinbajo stated that with chronicles on exemplary Nigerians like Maimalari, who he said had forged a place for himself in history as if he lived for eternity, despite living for only 34 years, history would be a useful tool in the propagation of good examples.
According to him, “Without a grounding in history, how do we know who we are? Where we come from? and more importantly, as people, where we are going to?
“We have been concerned, as a government, with the decline in the creation and study of history and this has seen us recover History from the place where it has been ignored for far too long and placed it back firmly in the school curriculum.
“Often, the Nigerian landscape has been disfigured by appalling examples of poor leadership and bad governance.
“So dominant has been that our youths can be misled into feeling that there is no total absence of idealism and heroism in our society. Yet, nothing can be further from the truth.”
The Acting President therefore urged more Nigerians, particularly those involved in managing public affairs to put their thoughts down in writing in order contribute to the emergence of the national consensus and narrative that would situate the present and past and naturally, concretise the future.
