Poor education and intolerance

Where education is not a major provision in a community’s infrastructure, confusion can govern attitudes.

It is easy to denigrate and demonize an ethnic or religious category of people when it appears under the spotlight for the fi rst time.

Where nothing is known about a particular religion, misinformation and profi ling can be refined by propaganda and spread throughout communities, cities and countries.

Discrimination against people in any setting is generally accepted and spread through ignorance.

Where facts and information can be withheld or censored, the way is open for a biased curriculum to be circulated.

These continuing practices of invaders segregate citizens with divide-and-rule strategies.

No diff erent in colonial era where one part of the population was off ered education and industry while the other was left untutored and unemployed.

Those educated soon started to feel socially, morally and spiritually superior to their poorer counterparts.

Th e disenfranchised were opened to exploitation of resentment, envy and rebellion.

Those with poor education are not always able to access information that can be compared to propaganda fuelled by specialinterest groups.

Even though many human-rights laws have components of spiritual ideals, suppression of information about diff erent people and religions can assign these rights exclusively to majority communities.

With ethical guidelines intimating an embrace of universal rights, events can nevertheless be orchestrated to limit those rights selectively.

Religious intolerance can be introduced to a population’s psyche where it never existed before.

Where education is not available, it is possible to build on people’s fears and contrived prejudices that their rights are being threatened by followers of a diff erent faith.

In the words of one late Pa. Ladipo Johnson, “Nigeria is moving fast in the wrong direction.

” Further problems arise when fanatics base their beliefs and proclamations and actions on a few select principles ?of their faith.

Either ones that suit their own agenda or, principles around which their agendas are created.

And here lay the compounded difficulties of translation and interpretations.

? Sometimes it seems that Nigerians can be tolerant of diff erent customs and cultures, but when it comes to a matter of religious diff erences, even those which occur among diff erent sects of the same religion, divisions remain.

It was Pearl S.  Buck who said and I believe it to be true that, “it’s natural anywhere that people like their own kind but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for their own kind should lead them to the subjugation of whole groups of other people not like them.

” One wishes that we can pursue the Nigerian dream and mission through partnerships and create networks of cooperation that are focused on growth to improve the lives of millions of people.

Leave a Reply