Is Osun truly at the onset of a revolution?

JUNE 9, 2013 BY TUNDE FAGBENLE 4 COMMENTS



Tunde Fagbenle

There’s been a flurry of activity in the State of Osun (you call a person or place how it chooses to be called, jo) in the last few weeks to invite the attention of Nigerians everywhere and raise the curiosity of many a serious thinker – what is all these about? Is there much substance to it or is it more of noise and make-belief?

It started with Oyes-TECH, itself an offshoot of O-YES (the Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme which reportedly employed 20,000 youths in the take-off of its rolling scheme at the onset of the administration), as one of the many O-This and O-That by which the state continues to brand its sundry development programmes, quickly appropriating the ‘O’ such that any other state with first letter O has to figure something else with which to distinguish itself or its programmes.

I happened to be in Osogbo to tend to my farm that day in early May and was opportuned to witness the graduation (“Freedom” in our traditional artisans’ parlance) of the Oyes-Tech participants. It was an impressive event at the open field around the government house overlooking the high street from which curious passersby could catch a glimpse.

The political fanfare of it aside, I was truly touched by the sight of fresh graduands, young male and female, clearly impromptu stating their experiences during the training programme that imbued them with broad understanding of the theoretical framework in ICT and the skills to engage in repairs, servicing, maintenance and assembling of mobile phones, computers, etc.

The crash-programme aimed at training 20,000 youths was run in conjunction with a technical partner, RLG-Communications, that set up some ten training centres spread all over the state as part of the government’s broader “state industrialisation and citizenry empowerment” agenda – the “teach a man how to fish” principle.

There’s the O-REAP (for Osun Rural Enterprise & Agric Programme that aims to turn the state into the food basket for the region if not the country), the O-CLEAN (for environment hygiene and cleanliness) and a number of other ‘O’ programmes all over the place, simultaneous and bewildering. Are these fancy ideas or are they well grounded? Are they sustainable? These are valid questions to engage the mind more from genuine fear and sincere hope than from arrant pessimism or sheer negativity of idle naysayers.

But the real story, the mother of all, is this one about the state’s recently launched “Tablet of Knowledge,” a technological contraption specially designed for secondary school pupils of the State of Osun. Typically of Ogbeni’s fierce advocacy for resurgence and promotion of Yoruba culture, religion and language, the tablet is christened OpónÌmò.

Word about it has been about in the last month or so but I was not enthused. I was filled with reservation, even apprehension about it. Why this? Why now? What cost? How meaningful? How sustainable? Where is the precedent? What result? And a million other queries concentrated my mind. I am of the old school, and that may partly accounts for my reservation, but I’m far better than a mate of mine (name withheld!) who is still stuck with his typewriter and remains grumpy,even resistant, to the advent of computers.

I began to put phone calls around the globe to those whose opinion I respect. “What is this Ogbeni’s OpónÌmò about?” I asked. No one seemed able to argue well for it. Everyone was going to make a check and get back to me. Has this man been railroaded into it by some smooth-talking Nigerian-Americans eager to do business and prey on Ogbeni’s passion for education and eagerness for trail-blazing?

But I am getting to be a convert to the futuristic possibilities of the OpónÌmò. I have taken time to read some available literature on it, including its own dedicated website: http://www.opon-imo.com, and comparative tendencies in other countries. But it started with unblocking my prejudice and reminding myself that all new and great ideas require vision and courage to pursue them to fruition.

There is no gainsaying the fact that education is the bedrock of development and electronic technology is the new age in education. OpónÌmò is seen as the learning tool that could revolutionise learning in developing states around the world. It is a stand alone e-learning tablet to be distributed free of charge to senior secondary school pupils and their teachers in Osun hoping it will radically transform the state into the leading educated state in Nigeria in the immediate and Africa’s Japan in the not too distant future. The Android 4.0 technology is preloaded with learning materials consisting of 56 E-books on 17 core subjects, wide-ranging video and audio tutorials, some 10 years past question papers and Mock Exam tests for WASSCE, brain-developing games, etc.

From research, which the website also highlights, the tablet technology is being embraced by a number of countries including the US, the UK, Thailand, Turkey, etc. Thailand, for example last year, distributed 850,000 to Thai students and teachers out of its planned 1.7 million tablets in its “One Tablet Per Child” scheme. Turkey too is aiming to bring as many as 10.6 million tablets to local schoolchildren as part of its ‘Fatih’ project, says a report, with the proviso by the government that “The production of tablets should be in Turkey and the producer company should establish a research and development centre within the borders of Turkey.”

The State of Osun is said to be having the tablet assembly factory in Osogbo with nine support centres (one per federal constituency) to ensure development of local capacity and gainful employment that, again, the OYES-TECH keys into.

To be sure, in all the other countries cited, the tablet is seen only in complementarity with traditional books and not in displacement. But there is a building consensus that the technology is the future trend, with its cost-saving element countervailing budget constraints in education. As Apple puts it: “Budget constraints force schools to use the same books year after year, long after the content is out of date. But with textbooks on ipad (tablet) students can get a brand-new version each year — for a fraction of the price of a paper book.”

I still have my worries about OpónÌmò although its website tries to allay most of them. Its success will depend on all of us – pupils, teachers, parents – setting aside our objections, reservations, or antagonism – to embrace it,first and foremost by developing a sense of collective ownership such that any careless handling by any pupil would be rebuked and forbidden.

The maverick governor of the state, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, is clearly in a hurry to move the state forward, not only ahead of its peers but thrust it sufficiently to catch up with the rest of the developed world. But I cannot in all honesty charge the governor with “too much haste” having myself long posited that there cannot be anything like “too much hurry” in the repair of the mess we are in this country.

Something tells me we are at the onset of a revolutionary development in Osun. O yes, I hope we are.