To understand why Nigeria continues to struggle with cohesion in critical sectors such as healthcare, education, and public administration, one need only examine the foundations of our basic education, particularly the Junior Secondary School (JSS) History curriculum.
This framing is not merely outdated; it is actively harmful. In contemporary governance and technology discourse, decentralized systems are widely recognised as resilient, adaptive, and participatory.
Yet, our curriculum consigns societies such as the Igbo, Ijaw, and Tiv to the margins, while positioning the Hausa, Fulani, and Yoruba empires as the primary drivers of civilization.
This is not a neutral academic choice. It functions as social conditioning. When discrimination surfaces in employment, professional training, or public service; when a chief medical director feels emboldened to exclude candidates based on ethnicity, it is often the replay of a script first installed in JSS classrooms.
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A script that teaches some Nigerians to see themselves as 'core' to the state, and others as 'peripheral.'
Nigeria urgently needs a curriculum reset. The Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) must initiate a comprehensive review; one that moves beyond the simplistic “Empire versus Tribe” framework toward a more accurate “Civilization versus Civilization” narrative.
From trans-Saharan trade networks in the North to bronze casting, republican governance, and commerce in the East and South, every society contributed meaningfully to Nigeria’s historical operating system.
To diminish any node is to weaken the entire network. And systems built on exclusion, history teaches us, eventually fail.
- Editorial@ITREALMS
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