COVID-19 Shows Wholly Online Education Has No Future

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Before COVID-19, we were told that traditional brick-and-mortar institutions and face-to-face instructional methods were museum-bound. That compelled me to enroll for online teaching certification 5 years ago.

But the COVID-19-inspired transition to online-only pedagogy across the world this year has shown that the reports of the death of traditional ways of knowledge dissemination are greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain.

The data that has emerged, at least in the US, shows that wholly online learning environments are too inadequate and too socially impoverished to stand in for the full "college experience." Students detest it, parents resent it, and teachers chafe at it.

There're many reasons for this. I'll share only one personal example to make my point. A few years ago, a student I taught in an entirely online class and whom I'd never physically met requested me to write a recommendation letter for her for a job.

Sadly, I couldn't say anything about the student other than that she took and passed a class I taught her. I couldn't speak to her character, her personality, her social skills, her discursive abilities, or other non-academic attributes that are central to constructing her full portrait. I politely told her I couldn't write a recommendation letter that would be helpful to her. I've heard similar experiences from my colleagues.

If there's any positive thing that COVID-19 has done to education, it is that it has dramatized the irreplaceability, at least for the foreseeable future, of face-to-face instructional methods.

Coronavirus and Exploding Conspiracy Theories of Religious Crackpots

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi

The novel coronavirus is not only devastating humankind, it is also disrupting the settled certainties and spiritual verities of religious fanatics for whom atavistic and superstitious frames of reference are the only ways to make sense of the world around them.

I’ll start from fringe members of my own religious community. When the new coronavirus first emerged in China, a lunatic fringe of the Nigerian Muslim community celebrated it and said it was Allah’s punishment against China for mistreating its Muslim minority population.

They said the clearest indication that it was divine pestilence to avenge the persecution of Chinese Muslims could be seen in the fact that all Chinese people were compelled to cover their whole bodies in ways that were reminiscent of the sartorial choices Allah enjoined Muslims, especially Muslim women, to make, which China denies its Muslim minority.

I recall telling a religious crackpot who made this silly argument early this year that it wasn’t the first time that people had covered their bodies in response to a pandemic. The 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed nearly half a million Nigerians and more than 50 million people worldwide, caused people to wear face masks.

I added that his theory would fall apart if the virus made its way to Muslim communities. But, like other simpleminded, delusory loonies, he was certain that Muslims were providentially inoculated against Allah’s pandemic for infidels.

Shortly after, Iran became one of the epicenters of the new coronavirus. It killed people, including political and religious leaders, with the same viciousness that it did Chinese atheists, Buddhists, and Taoists.

Then Sunni zealots among the conspiracy theorists changed tack and said Iranians became susceptible to the virus because, being Shiites, they are not real Muslims, and that the Hazrat Masumeh Shrine in Qom, Iran, which was the principal way by which the virus spread in the country, isn’t “Islamic.”

Of course, we all know the virus has infected Sunni Muslim strongholds in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. For the first time in decades, al-Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, Islam’s two holiest mosques, were closed to worshippers because of COVID-19.

As of the time of writing this column, there were 3,651 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 47 deaths in Saudi Arabia. An April 8, 2020 New York Times report said up to 150 members of the Saudi Royal family have been infected with the virus and that Faisal bin Bandar Al Saud, the king’s nephew, is in intensive care unit arising from COVID-19.

The tenor of the conspiracy theory has changed again. Coronavirus is now a grand plot by “Jews” to halt the inexorable march of Islam, to disrupt Muslim rituals in Mecca, and to dominate the world to the exclusion of Muslims!

There are different Christian versions of this superstitious lunacy. Enoch Adeboye, the general overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), for instance, said the new coronavirus would not infect, much less kill, people “who serve God wholeheartedly.”

Since thousands of Christians, including medical professionals who were on the front lines in the service of humanity, were killed by the disease, Adeboyean logic would have us believe that they died because they didn’t “serve God wholeheartedly.”

Abia State governor Okezie Ikpeazu upped the ante of religious irrationality when he said, “Abia is the only state [in Nigeria] that is mentioned in the Bible. We have been promised by God that none of these diseases will get to us. We saw Ebola and pox. Even this one [COVID-19) it won’t get to us.”

If Abia State is immune from COVID-19 because of the phonological accident that caused the word “Abia” to appear once in the Bible, why is the virus running riot in Israel, the very scene of the Bible?

As of Friday when this column was written, more than 10,000 people have tested positive for the new coronavirus in Israel, and nearly 100 people have died from it. But Israel was mentioned countless times in the Bible.

Italy, the headquarters of Catholicism and of Christianity for centuries, has been one of the worst-hit countries in the coronavirus pandemic, with 147,577 infections and nearly 20,000 deaths as of April 10.

What is so special about Abia that God would spare it of the coronavirus but let it fatally maraud Italy and Israel? Even the United States that Nigerians like to call “God’s own country” and whose motto is “In God we trust” is now the epicenter of the coronavirus.

The unvarnished, unsentimental truth is that COVID-19—and other natural calamities that periodically befall humankind—isn’t a providential, celestial missile that faith can give us cover from. Nature is insensitive to our emotions and sensibilities. Our piety, prayers, and religious affiliations can never provide us with safeguards against the ruthlessly unstoppable march of nature.

A rational, scientific mindset free of the encumbrances of silly, retarded superstitions is what we need. And that’s precisely what is lacking in Nigeria—and many developing countries.

The vast majority of our people stand in uncomprehending awe before the littlest natural complexity and quickly take recourse to mythic, superstitious explanations for confounding but knowable phenomena. It is this mindset that explains why Nigerians give “testimonies” of “God’s mercies” on them for surviving car crashes in which others perished. They imply that God hates the people who die in car accidents.

This is a country where many people still believe that one can become wealthy through the ritual murders of other humans, where deaths, including car accidents, are attributed to witchcraft and sorcery, where the ability to perform cheap magic tricks is invariably associated with the possession of supernatural powers.

Sadly, in Nigeria, superstition and anti-scientific attitudes often take refuge under religion so that an attack on superstition and pre-scientific attitudes is usually mistaken for an attack on religion. But that’s a fallacious association. Both historical and contemporary examples show that religion and science can co-exist.

Religion isn’t necessarily synonymous with superstition, nor is science necessarily the anti-thesis of religion. Superstition, belief in witchcraft and sorcery, and a disdain for the scientific method represent the infancy of human reasoning. It’s sad that many Nigerians have not evolved from this.

I have no doubt that unthinking obsession with supernaturalism and metaphysical claptrap is Nigeria’s, nay Africa’s, biggest stumbling-block to progress.

Maryam Uwais and COVIK 419 Writ Large
"Those who benefit from the conditional cash transfer of the Federal Government as palliative to cushion the effects of the lockdown caused by the deadly Coronavirus don't want to be addressed as poor people. That is why we can't publish their names.

"Also, the beneficiaries of the Federal Government's gesture are invisible and dwell where the conventional society cannot see them, and carrying journalists along to investigate the authenticity of the payments to the target persons will be cost implicative to the scheme because the funds at hand can't pay for extra burden as we are only managing what we have."

Maryam Uwais
Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment on Channels TV Sunrise Daily.

When I received the above text on WhatsApp on April 10, 2020 from several people, I thought someone initially just made it up for comic relief and that it was being shared by people on social media in ignorance.

In fact, I persuaded an older friend that the quote couldn't be real, based on what I’d read of Maryam Uwais who strikes me as an extremely smart woman. But after watching the video clip of her interview a few hours after I’d read the text, where I heard her express sentiments that were consistent with the first sentence, I was compelled to go back to WhatsApp and retract what I said to my older friend about the quote.

Anyone who is too proud to be called poor is clearly not poor. The pangs of hunger are stronger than the vanity of self-esteem. That’s why there are hordes of Nigerian “e-beggars” who drop their names and account numbers on social media without shame during social media “giveaways”—and sometimes without “giveaways.”

But the whole point of asking for the identity of the people who benefited from the government’s “palliatives” is to be able to authenticate government’s claims.

In any case, the minister of humanitarian affairs, who supervises the disbursement of the “palliatives,” was reported by the Daily Nigerian to have stolen 200 tonnes of date palms (dabino) donated to internally displaced persons in the northeast by the Saudi Arabian government in 2017. This is COVIK 4-1-9 writ large!

Soldiers on Government Sanctioned Mass Suicide Mission

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

The Wall Street Journal’s disturbing July 31 report of the secret mass burial of at least a thousand Nigerian soldiers who were murdered by Boko Haram terrorists has, once again, brought to the fore the conscienceless villainy and duplicity  of the Buhari regime and its illegal service chiefs who have overstayed their statutorily mandated length of service by  several months.

The regime never stops to claim that it has “defeated” Boko Haram even when indisputable evidence to the contrary stares it in the face. In late last year, for instance, it was reported that Boko Haram had murdered hundreds of Nigerian soldiers. Yet the federal government did not consider it fitting to acknowledge the tragedy, much less condole with the families of the deceased soldiers.

In fact, on the day the fallen soldiers were given an undignified mass burial, Buhari met with APC senators who’d threatened to defect to other parties. Several reports have also surfaced to show that soldiers fighting on the frontlines are owed several months’ worth of allowances and that many of them are now practically beggars.

TheCable’s September 21, 2018 investigations show that the military men fighting Boko Haram are practically being forced to commit suicide because they are severely ill equipped. I also shared videos on Facebook and Twitter yesterday of Nigerian soldiers battling what seem like Boko Haram terrorists with obsolete, barely functional guns. That’s why they are sitting ducks for Boko Haram. They are on a government-sanctioned mass suicide mission.

In other words, there is no difference between President Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari in the prosecution of the war against Boko Haram. Well, the only difference is that the Buhari regime has been more effective in muzzling the press, in intimidating private individuals in the northeast into not disclosing the true situation of the Boko Haram insurgency in the region, and in enlisting well-heeled individuals in its propaganda efforts.

What is now coming to light in spite of government’s studious efforts to suppress it supports my column of February 24, 2018 titled “Bursting the Myth of Buhari’s Boko Haram ‘Success’.” Almost everything I said in that column is bubbling to the surface now. The sanguinary in-fighting among Boko Haram members, which I said was the biggest reason for the lull in its attacks between 2016 and early 2018, has now subsided considerably.

I have taken the liberty to reproduce portions of my previous article, which seemed incredulous to many people when it was first published:

A false narrative that several people cherish about the Buhari government is the notion that its singular greatest achievement is its success in containing, downgrading, or defeating Boko Haram. It’s like a consolation prize to compensate for the government’s abject failure in every index of governance. I recognize that taking away the consolation prize of Buhari’s Boko Haram success narrative would cause psychic and cognitive dislocation in many people…

But the question I always ask people who talk of the Buhari administration’s “success” in “downgrading” or “technically defeating” Boko Haram (whatever in the world that means) is: what exactly has Buhari done that hasn’t been done by his predecessor to bring about his so-called success? The only intelligent answer I’ve received is that he ordered the relocation of the command center for Nigeria's military operation against Boko Haram to Maiduguri. Well, that’s commendable, but it conceals the unchanged, sordid underbelly of military authorities.

For instance, the military is still severely underfunded and ill-equipped. Soldiers on the front lines are still owed backlogs of allowances; several of them still starve and survive on the goodwill of do-gooders. Two videos of the heartrending conditions of our military men fighting Haram went viral sometime ago, and military authorities were both embarrassed and caught flatfooted. I periodically speak with my relatives and friends in the military fighting Boko Haram, and they say little or nothing has changed, except that propaganda and media management have become more effective. The fat cats in the military still exploit and feed fat on the misery of the foot soldiers.

Even on the symbolic plane, which is the easiest to navigate, Buhari hasn’t been better than his predecessor. He did not visit our foot soldiers in Borno to boost their morale nor did he visit IDPs whose misery has become one of the most horrendous humanitarian disasters in the world. He only visited Borno on October 1, 2017—more than 2 years after being in power—to celebrate Independence Day with the military after so much pressure was brought to bear on him by critics. There are three major reasons why the intensity of the Boko Haram scourge has subsided, none of which has anything to do with Buhari’s policies on Boko Haram.

One, our foot soldiers, like always, have never wavered in their bravery and persistence in spite of their prevailing untoward conditions. This isn’t because of the president; it is in spite of the president.

Two, Boko Haram has been weakened by an enervatingly bitter and sanguinary internal schism. Since at least September 2016, the Abubakar Shekau and Abu Musab al-Barnawi factions of Boko Haram have killed each other more than the military has killed them.

Three, and most important, the conspiracy theories and tacit, if unwitting, support that emboldened Boko Haram in the north because a southern Christian was president have all but disappeared, making it easy for the military to get more cooperation from the local population. Remember Buhari said, in June 2013 in a Liberty Radio interview in Kaduna, that the military’s onslaught against Boko Haram amounted to “injustice” against the “north.”

Babachir David Lawal, then a CPC politician, infamously said Boko Haram was a PDP plot to “depopulate” the northeast because the region doesn’t vote PDP. As my friend from the northeast noted on my Facebook page, “Borno elder Shettima Ali Monguno used to call BH ‘our children’ and he only stopped after he was kidnapped for ransom by the group.”

The Northern Elders Forum in 2013 said Boko Haram members should be given amnesty, not killed. Even then PDP chairman Bamanga Tukur said in 2011 that “Boko Haram is fighting for justice. Boko Haram is another name for justice.” Several Borno elders and everyday citizens protected Boko Haram members and frustrated the military.

In fact, in June 2012, Borno elders told the government of the day to withdraw soldiers fighting Boko Haram terrorists from the state. (But when the military dropped a bomb and killed scores of IDPs, these Borno elders didn't even as much as say a word of condemnation.)

I published letters in 2014 from Borno readers of my column that said the people would rather live with Boko Haram than cooperate with the military because they believed the military was part of a grand plot to annihilate them. The military was so frustrated that it almost wiped out the entire village of Baga in April 2013 when residents provided cover for Boko Haram insurgents who escaped into the area. I wrote to condemn the military at the time.

All this changed because the president is no longer a Christian from the south. Buhari isn’t just a northern Muslim; his mother is half Kanuri, and that’s why most (certainly not all) people from the region intentionally exaggerate the extent of safety and security in the region even when the facts give the lie to their claims. It's all ethnic solidarity.

Because someone with some Kanuri blood in him is president, Boko Haram is no longer a plot to depopulate the northeast. No northern elder is pleading amnesty on the group’s behalf. The group is no longer fighting “for justice.” Killing them is no longer “injustice” to the “north.” And everything is now hunky-dory. Ethno-regional bigotry will be the death of Nigeria.