Former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan yesterday gave a press conference at the Geneva Press Club to a packed audience of diplomats, policy makers and journalists where he gave details of his post presidential focus and touched on some of the roles his administration played in key areas of the Nigerian and West Africa polity, with particular emphasis on Security and Education.
Below are extracts of his remarks and pictures from the event....
Ladies and Gentlemen of the press, I thank you for coming to hear me speak on the twin issues of education and security.
Though this event is billed as a press conference on a Better Security and Education for West Africa, for the sake of time, I will focus on my experience in government which gave me a practical demonstration of how education impacts on security.
I will thereafter touch on my post presidential focus which is on advancing democracy and good governance in Africa and increasing access to opportunity for wealth generation in Africa.
If you peruse the official UNESCO literacy rates by country, what you will find is that all of the top ten most literate nations in the world are at peace, while almost all of the top 10 least literate nations in the world are in a state of either outright war or general insecurity.
Lower education levels are linked to poverty and poverty is one of the chief causative factors of crime whether it is terrorism or militancy or felonies.
With this at the back of my mind, I began the practice of giving education the highest sectoral allocation beginning with my very first budget as President in 2011.
My policy was to fight insecurity in the immediate term using counter insurgency strategies and the military and for the long term I fought it using education as a tool.
As I have always believed, if we do not spend billions educating our youths today, we will spend it fighting insecurity tomorrow. And you do not have to spend on education just because of insecurity. It is also the prudent thing to do.
Nigeria, or any African nation for that matter, can never become wealthy by selling more minerals or raw materials such as oil. Our wealth as a nation is between the ears of our people.
It is no coincidence that the Northeast epicenter of terrorism in Nigeria is also the region with the highest rate of illiteracy and the least developed part of Nigeria.
In Nigeria, the Federal Government actually does not have a responsibility for primary and secondary education, but I could not in good conscience stomach a situation where 52.4% of males in the Northeastern region of Nigeria have no formal Western education.
The figure is even worse when you take into account the states most affected by the insurgency.
83.3% of male population in Yobe state have no formal Western education. In Borno state it is 63.6%.
Bearing this in mind is it a coincidence that the Boko Haram insurgency is strongest in these two states?
So even though we did not have a responsibility for primary and secondary education going by the way the Nigerian federation works, I felt that where I had ability, I also had responsibility even if the constitution said it was not my responsibility.
Knowing that terrorism thrives under such conditions my immediate goal was to increase the penetration of Western education in the region while at the same time making sure that the people of the region did not see it as a threat to their age old practices of itinerant Islamic education known as Almajiri.
For the first time in Nigeria's history, the Federal Government which I led, set out to build 400 Almajiri schools with specialized curricula that combined Western and Islamic education. 160 of them had been completed before I left office.
I am also glad to state that when I emerged as President of Nigeria on May 6th 2010, there were nine states in the Northern part of the country that did no
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