A businessman and education promoter, Kingsley Wali, has said governments at the federal and state levels should be worried about growing negative cliches among the young generation of Nigerians that “education is a scam.”
Wali, who gave the warning at the second quarter of the August Meeting held in Port Harcourt, where the book “Grit” by Gomba Obari was reviewed, decried the lack of government investment in education.
He explained that lack of education incentives, especially graduate unemployment, was a major cause of the growing disinterest in education among the country’s youths.
He said: “People go through school, and they come out, no jobs, so why do I have to take school seriously? This has led us to a point where our younger generation is saying that education is a scam.
“That’s something that should bother the government. Because you are grooming a generation of people who are not educated, and of course, we know the implications of that.
“What it quickly translates into is a people who don’t understand what is happening around them, and if they don’t understand, they don’t have hopes, so they just do whatever they want to do”.
Wali stated that the mission of the August Meeting was to fill the big gap between writing and reading in Nigeria, beginning from Port Harcourt.
He said: “Like we have always said, we discovered that there was a big gap between writing and reading, and we realised that because people were not reading, they were not keeping tabs on things around them.
“But most importantly, even the ones that were written didn’t talk about Nigeria and our issues. So what we are trying to do is get our people to read books written by Nigerians about Nigeria so our people can get to know their country a lot better. So, you don’t have children from Sokoto State who don’t know anything about Rivers State.
“So what we are trying to do is to bridge the gap between reading and writing, not forgetting the fact that even those who are writing are having issues. People don’t read, because people don’t read they (the writers) the numbers out there are not much, publishers are not even interested.”
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