… What is the utility of Western Education in the African Context?
A popular tale in my youth had the former premier of the Western Region of Nigeria, Chief SL Akintola, so miffed by the haughtiness, arrogance, stubbornness, and the intransigence of the people of Ekiti who believed that their embrace of Western education gave them some superiority, Akintola was said to have exclaimed, Awon Ekiti yi ti le kawe ju. Awọn ni Professor Aluko, Professor Atioro / These Ekitis can study too much. It is among them that we find Professor Aluko (Billed Turaco) and Professor Atioro (African Pied Hornbill).
A well-educated and powerful orator in his own right, the Oloye Aare Ona Kakanfo XIII was exacerbated by the inability of the Ekitis to apply native intelligence to their acclaimed diplomas and degrees.
As it was then, so it is today.
Such tales might help us understand the brutal clarity of Carter G. Woodson’s words, which slice through illusions and delusions with surgical cruelty: “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically… but education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.”
This is a strong diagnosis. And nowhere does this diagnosis find more tragic confirmation than in my home state, Ekiti, in South-West Nigeria.
Ekiti State is the self-anointed “Fountain of Knowledge” of Nigeria.
But the state that loudly and proudly called itself the citadel of Western-style literacy in Nigeria now stands exposed, not as a triumph of enlightenment but as a laboratory of mis-education.
Ekiti today is a place where certificates multiply, but dignity, integrity, and productivity evaporate into non-existence. You don’t see them anymore. Ekiti is where intellectualism is loudly advertised, yet governance collapses into vulgar materialism.
Alas, my home state continues to live on past glory!
A state that prides itself on knowledge has, in the cold arithmetic of governance, chosen SUVs over survival. In 2024, over ₦1.4 billion was spent procuring 40 luxury GAC vehicles for political office holders, an average of ₦36 million per beneficiary.
This shouldn’t be regarded as a mere extravagance; it is a declaration of values. This is the current political theology in which the comfort of the elite is canonized, while the suffering of the masses is reduced to footnotes.
The obscenity becomes clearer when placed beside the lived reality of the people of Ekiti. The abject poverty one sees in parts of Ekiti is Dickensian in its primitiveness.
Over 85% of households in Ekiti State lack access to proper sanitation. More than three-quarters struggle without clean drinking water. The roads are terrible. Healthcare access hovers at a scandalous 19%. Yet the state found the fiscal enthusiasm to devote 22% of its revenue to luxury vehicles for its overpampered elite.
Here, Frantz Fanon rises like a ghost over Ado-Ekiti, whispering his eternal warning from The Wretched of the Earth: “The national bourgeoisie… is quite simply nothing more than a little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster.”
Fanon understood what many still refuse to confront, that the tragedy of the postcolonial state is not merely economic. It is psychological. The colonized elite, trained in the epistemology of their former masters, do not dismantle the structure of exploitation. They inherited, perfected, and localized it.
Black Skin, White Mask.
My Ekiti state is not an exception; it is a specimen.
For what is Western education in the African context, when stripped of its moral pretensions?
It is definitely not, as advertised, a pathway to political or economic liberation. What we have is a filtration system that selects a narrow elite, conditions them in foreign frameworks, and redeploys them as intermediaries between global capital and local dispossession, which they call investment.
Woodson warned us. Fanon diagnosed it. Ekiti confirms it.
The paradox is therefore complete: a highly literate population governed with astonishing illiteracy of purpose.
That is why a state like Ekiti, despite its abundance of academic professors and inestimable natural resources, remains one of Nigeria’s least developed states.
The defenders of the system will point, as they always do, to fanciful statistical embellishments. They will cite improved health indicators, budgetary allocations, and technocratic jargon crafted for donor consumption.
They will insist that billions are “allocated” to primary healthcare, that investments exist across ministries, and that development is “ongoing.”
What they don’t tell is that budgetary allocation is not transformation, and budget lines do not reflect the lived realities of the people.
People do not read or eat policy documents. They drink water, or they do not.
And, sadly, in my Ekiti State, too many people do not get to drink potable water from birth to grave.
What we are witnessing in Ekiti/Nigeria/Africa is not a failure of education in the narrow sense of literacy or certification. It is the catastrophic success of mis-education. The production of a class that is technically proficient yet morally hollow; linguistically polished yet culturally alienated; globally conversant yet locally indifferent.
Ekiti professors speak impeccable English, draft elegant memos, attend international conferences, and deploy the vocabulary of “sustainable development” with rehearsed fluency.
But they cannot, or will not, translate that knowledge into economic justice for their own people. They have done nothing to take advantage of the state’s unique geography and topology to transform Ekiti into a more livable place.
Why can’t the mountains in Ekiti be transformed into what we see in South Africa, Switzerland, and even in Ghana – the Glider’s resorts in the Kwahu area?
Why haven’t all the professors of agriculture in Ekiti been able to add any value to the poor farmers’ output, or to the primitive implements of Ekiti farmers?
This is precisely the danger Woodson identified: an education that equips individuals to function efficiently within a system without ever questioning its legitimacy.
In Ekiti, education has not produced deep thinkers or engineers. It has produced managers who are caretakers of inherited dysfunction.
The Yoruba would call it a deeper tragedy. What we have is not ignorance, but misdirected knowledge. We don’t have darkness, but light that is used to blind.
For what do we make of a state where the educated elite behave indistinguishably from the illiterate political class they claimed superiority over?
Sadly, in Ekiti, degrees serve not as instruments of service, but as licenses for extraction?
Ekiti elite are, to borrow from the biting idiom of the street, old thieves in new robes. Modern in appearance, medieval in primitive acquisitive instinct.
Cut off from indigenous epistemologies, detached from the philosophical grounding of their own civilization, these professors govern in borrowed tongues, linguistically estranged from the very people whose lives they administer. Their speeches are calibrated for external validation, not internal transformation. Their legitimacy flows upward, toward global approval systems, rather than outward, toward the communities they claim to serve.
That is why we have governors in a linguistically homogeneous Ekiti State addressing their people in the English language without a sense of shame or irony.
A man who thinks in borrowed categories will govern in borrowed priorities.
Thus, hospitals remain underfunded while convoys of governors and commissioners expand. Sanitation collapses while allowances of every sort rise. Human development is sacrificed at the altar of elite consumption.
Ekiti’s tragedy is not local; it’s continental.
It is the story of an Africa that mistook schooling for education, certification for consciousness, and Western validation for progress. It is the story of a political class that has mastered the aesthetics of governance while abandoning its ethics.
And it is here that Fanon’s warning returns with prophetic force: the postcolonial elite, lacking a revolutionary vision, retreats into consumption. Into spectacle and into mimicry.
They become, in essence, caricatures of the very systems that once dominated them.
The Ekiti Paradox is thus resolved in the most uncomfortable way possible: there is no paradox at all.
What we are seeing is the logical outcome of an educational system divorced from purpose. A system that produces individuals capable of navigating power, but not transforming it. A system that rewards compliance, not courage; adaptation, not originality.
And verily, verily, we say, until that changes, nothing else will.
Until education in Africa is re-rooted, anchored in indigenous knowledge systems, guided by moral philosophy, and oriented toward collective uplift rather than individual escape, the cycle will persist.
Until then, we shall continue to have more graduates, more titles. more SUVs, and fewer clinics and schools.
In the end, the harshest truth is this: when the educated abandon the purpose of education, they do not merely fail their societies, they become its most sophisticated predators.
That is what we witness in Ekiti State – the self-generated “Fountain of knowledge.”
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
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