Why Did Africa Abandon the Practical Environmental Discipline That Worked and Replace It with Worthless Classroom Rituals?

One of the enduring tragedies of post-colonial Africa is not merely that we rejected colonial rule, which was both inevitable and desirable, but that, in our emotional haste to dismantle the colonial inheritance, we also discarded some of the few practical habits that made our societies cleaner, healthier, and more orderly.

Our study of history shows that civilizations do not advance by rejecting everything they inherit. They made progress by separating what is useful from what is oppressive and useless.

The Chinese remain the best example. They treated their colonization like a bad interlude in their 4k years history. They advanced by lapping up Western science and education like famished hyenas, while maintaining strict fidelity to their Confucian roots. Unlike us, they learned from their mistakes and refused to be eternal whiners.

Our Elders in their timeless wisdom say only a fool burns down his entire house because one room is infested with termites.

Sadly, that is precisely what we in Africa have done in far too many spheres of public life. We threw the child away with the dirty water.

Unlike the Chinese, we didn't inherit the wisdom of our ancestors.

Nowhere is our intellectual bankruptcy more glaring than in the way we have transformed Environmental Studies into another sterile subject of study rather than preserving its original purpose as a practical discipline of civic responsibility.

Environmental Studies, in its simplest and most useful definition, concerns the relationship between human beings and their physical surroundings.

It teaches how communities ought to manage sanitation, conserve natural resources, maintain healthy public spaces and cultivate habits that promote public well-being.

Although the integrated subject now known as Environmental Studies was largely developed in African education systems after independence, it grew out of earlier traditions of school sanitation, hygiene, agriculture and civic responsibility that were strongly emphasized in many colonial schools.

In the past, we were not merely taught cleanliness; we practiced it. As schoolchildren, we swept our compounds daily and cleared the drains. We planted trees and cut the grass. We even had school farms.

Our villagers and neighborhoods benefited from organized school sanitation exercises because education was understood to involve the formation of character as much as the accumulation of knowledge.

Our independence was accompanied by that peculiar African genius for dismantling what works to erect monuments to fashionable stupidity.

Somewhere along the line, we sacrificed practical environmental discipline on the altar of academic credentialism. The broom disappeared from our schools, but the textbook multiplied. The shovel vanished, but the examination paper became sacred.

Today, like well-groomed parrots, African children can define pollution, conservation, erosion and sanitation with admirable grammatical precision. They can reproduce textbook definitions flawlessly in examination halls, score distinctions, collect certificates embossed with official seals and proudly march across graduation platforms, only to step outside into streets submerged beneath mountains of refuse, clogged gutters, stagnant drains that assault every human sense except perhaps the sense of shame.

Shame has become extinct in Africa.
One cannot help asking whether the architects of this educational absurdity have ever paused to reflect upon the grotesque contradiction they have created.

Of what conceivable value is an Environmental Studies certificate issued by a school whose toilets would be condemned by any health inspector?

The question we refuse to ask is: what exactly is being examined in this Environmental Studies’ examinations?

It's certainly neither environmental responsibility nor civic discipline. And it's not cleanliness.

One is tempted to conclude that what African schools increasingly certify is not competence but the extraordinary ability to memorize facts that bear no relationship whatsoever to the lived reality outside the classroom.

The evidence surrounds us with almost cruel clarity.

Walk through countless African markets where traders conduct business beside overflowing refuse dumps that have become permanent landmarks. Observe gutters transformed into open sewers as plastic waste overwhelms every drainage system.

Weeds in our public schools compete successfully with classroom buildings, and rubbish accumulates in corners with such permanence that one begins to suspect it has acquired legal tenancy.

Walk through our neighborhoods and see as mosquitoes flourish more efficiently than municipal authorities. In that same neighborhood, children are earning distinctions in Environmental Studies.

What is this if not an elaborate exercise in national self-deception?

There was a time when our schools accepted responsibility for shaping public conduct, and pupils understood that keeping their surroundings clean was neither punishment nor exploitation.

We had education in its most practical form. We learned that civilization begins with discipline, that sanitation is not the responsibility of invisible government officials but the collective obligation of every citizen, and that public spaces belong to everyone and therefore deserve everyone’s care.

Our lessons were not confined to notebooks; they were written into daily habits. We produced communities where cleanliness was regarded as normal rather than exceptional.

Lamentably, modern Africa, intoxicated by certificates and academic cosmetics, has substituted performance for substance.

We have become a continent addicted to stupid bureaucratized paperwork.

In today's Africa, every challenge must first be formalized as a syllabus before anyone attempts to solve it. Every practical problem is converted into another examinable subject.

We study agricultural science and award gifts to “National Best Farmer”, while importing food.

We study entrepreneurship while manufacturing unemployment. We study civic education while corruption flourishes. We now study Environmental Studies while drowning in filth.

We mistake intellectual theatre for genuine progress.

The uncomfortable truth is that Africa does not suffer from a shortage of diplomas. It suffers from a catastrophic shortage of disciplined habits. We are a walking contradiction.

Our continent needs fewer theoretical environmental experts and more citizens who, like their parents, instinctively refuse to litter public spaces.

Africa needs citizens who organize communal sanitation as a matter of pride and understand that cleanliness is neither a colonial nor a Western value, but a universal mark of an organized society.

No civilization has ever risen to greatness by celebrating dirt while distributing certificates for discussing cleanliness.

It is therefore time for us Africans to recover our common sense. We can't continue to lie in filth and grin like Sambos as we distribute useless certificates.

Environmental Studies must cease to be another examination subject designed to inflate pass rates and decorate walls with meaningless certificates.

It must return to its proper function as practical civic education.

Every school in Africa must become a model of environmental discipline, and every pupil graduate not merely with the ability to define sanitation but with the lifelong habit of practicing it. We see the Chinese, Japanese, and Iranians do it as a matter of course.

African classrooms should once again begin to produce citizens instead of mere examinees.

Africa has wasted enough precious decades congratulating itself over educational statistics that conceal social and societal decay.

The continent does not need another generation of graduates who can write brilliant essays about environmental management while navigating mountains of garbage on their way home.

Africa needs men and women whose education is measured by the condition of the communities they leave behind.

Until that simple truth is rediscovered, we shall continue awarding marks, diplomas and certificates for knowledge that neither transforms our societies nor alleviates our problems.

That is not education; it is organized make-believe masquerading as national development.

©️ Ọdọ́fin Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan, Ọdọ́fin I of Kasoa)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com

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