While serving in several ministerial capacities in Nigeria, the former minister of education, Oby Ezekwesili, has voiced remorse at being shut out of the country’s political structure.
Remember that from 2005 to 2007, Ezekwesili served as the Minister of Minerals for two years, and then the Minister of Education. From 2007 to 2012, she served as the Vice President of the World Bank-Africa Region in Washington, DC.
Speaking on Thursday at the School of Politics, Policy, and Governance (SPPG) Class of 2023 graduation and the first Africa Conference 2023 in Abuja, the former minister said that she and other ministers dissociated themselves from politics and believed they were not politicians.
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Ezekwesili called their behaviour “foolishness” and emphasised that no middle-class African professional should ever repeat such behaviour.
As the nation and all of Africa are currently experiencing a crisis, she continued, there is a need for awareness because politics affects everything.
She said, “When we were in government and policing people in government, we felt bad to be called a politician.
“Pluto always says that those who think that politics is beneath them will ultimately be ruled by their inferiors. At that time those of us who were in the ministerial group thought that we were not politicians, but you know, we were foolish people.
“We were the ones Pluto was referring to and we didn’t know. But what made me know, as we left governance, thinking that a lot of important foundations we left would be developed, it took less than a year for quite a number of the same foundations to be wrecked.
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“What do you think wrecked it? Politics. The same thing we disdained was what destroyed the little progress we made. there is no way you should repeat the pattern.
“No African middle-class professional should repeat the foolishness that we did by eliminating ourselves from politics. That is why I celebrate everyone who comes through the SPPG program, you are wiser than us.
“Politics touch everything. Be it the private sector, citizens, health, and whatever sector of life. We are graduating in the 100s what should be graduating is about 10,000. We are in a crisis. we can’t be graduating like Kennedy schools in America, where the system is designed to produce quality minds, although they are debatable these days. Because they too have told me to come to do fixed politics for them.”
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