Bookless in Nnewi: Between the Knowledge Society

Keynote Speech by Dr. Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu[*] To the 11^th Annual Convention of Nnewi Union USA (NUSA) Detroit, Michigan, 1 July 2006

The President of Nnewi USA, Isaac Emefo, the Vice-President of NUSA and Chairperson of the NUSA Convention 2006, Mrs. Ethel Momah (Arunne), members of the Board of Directors and Executive of NUSA, Umu Nnewi, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me begin by giving honor to who it is due: I thank the Almighty God who has made it possible for us all to be here today, and for me to be able to address you on this important occasion. I humbly and specially salute the Igwe of Nnewi, His Royal Highness Igwe Kenneth Orizu III, who unfortunately could not be here with us today. I recognize and salute Chief Chike Momah (Nnabuenyi Nnewi). I recognize and welcome Chief Ajulu Uzodike, Chair of the Board of Trustees of NUSA.

And let me express my heartfelt condolences to the family of Dr. & Mrs. J.O.S. Okeke on the very recent loss of their dear son. May his soul rest in peace.

I am honored to be your keynote speaker at this convention of Nnewi USA. It is an honor I particularly cherish because the nature of my work in the United Nations Organization has kept me on the go for many years, between and within various countries, and has not given me as much space and time to participate as actively in these kinds of activities as I would have wished.

I want to speak this morning to the theme of this year’s NUSA Convention: “Mmuta Bu Aku” (Education: A Timeless Wealth). It is a theme that is close to my heart, as I’m sure it is to yours, for several reasons. I put it to you, as my fellow lawyers would, that the survival and progress of Nnewi as a community depends on how we as its citizens come to grips with this challenge. So I want to speak this morning about the “knowledge society” and the illiterate society. I am afraid I will be somewhat critical, for it was the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who said of his native Britain: “I never criticize my country when I am abroad, but when I am at home I make up for it.” The NUSA Convention is home, so permit me to imitate Churchill on this score.

Let me begin with a personal story. Back home in my community in Nnewi, I know a man whose whole family is illiterate. The man is illiterate. His wife is illiterate. None of his children – about seven at the last count – has had anything beyond a primary school education.

So I offered this man to finance the education of one of his sons from primary to secondary school through university. This man and his son turned down my offer. The man apologetically informed me that they had decided that his son would go to trade somewhere in Northern Nigeria. It became clear to me that there was a problem of suicidal dimensions, not just with this man who turned away an opportunity of a lifetime – an opportunity to step out of darkness and confront the light – but also with our society as a whole. For, the man was not thinking and acting in a vacuum. I remembered with sadness the motto of the United Negro College Fund here in the United States: “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste”.

Nnewi is famous for the excellence of its citizens in the fields of commerce and business generally. The impression is that Nnewi is all money and little or no education. But we know this is a wrong impression: Nnewi has always had its fair share of educated men and women. Dr. Abyssinia Akweke Nwafor Orizu obtained his PhD in political science from an American university in 1944. Dr. Nnodu Okongwu, after whom Okongwu Memorial Grammer School was named, obtained a PhD in mathematics, also in America, soon thereafter. These were the trailblazers that ushered in the educated class in Nnewi and the rest of Igboland, together with non-Nnewi Igbo.

Leading, educated Igbo from Nnewi that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s include the late Chief M.C.K. Ajuluchukwu, late Ambassador Francis Chuka Nwokedi, the first Nigerian to become a permanent secretary in the Federal Civil Service in the mid-fifties even while we were still under colonial rule, late Justice Nwosu, the first Nnewi indigene to qualify as a lawyer in the 1940s, Dr. R.N. Onyemelukwe, the first Nnewi doctor, Engr. Francis Agbasi, the first engineer from Nnewi, and Chief Chike Momah, one of the first Nnewi citizens to graduate from the University College, Ibadan and later became a senior university librarian.

Others have followed in their footsteps, including many who became university professors in the fields of law and the physical and social sciences and mathematics. Others still became medical practitioners, judges, diplomats, permanent secretaries, senators, engineers, businessmen and industrialists, chartered accountants, and members of other professions.

But the civil war of 1967-1970 created severe social and economic dislocations. It also brought in its wake a breakdown in value systems that encouraged the pursuit of education. The commercial instinct became dominant, and education, now left largely to the families that had traditionally pursued it as a value, went into decline.

The families that opted not to strive to educate their children after the war, but could have, now had to make a choice – most times a false choice – between education, on the one hand, and “survival” or what they believed to be the pursuit of wealth, on the other. As for male children, their poor families saw keeping potential breadwinners in the educational system for ten to 12 years as bad economic sense – a “waste of time”. So they were sent off to become illiterate traders in a world in which, increasingly, computers and the ability to work with them are now the driving force of economic activity. Similarly, many poor families did not invest in the education of girls.

In the United States in the 19^th century, the phrase “go west, young man” was a popular one. Young men headed west into “no man’s land” in the California gold rush in search of treasure and consequent wealth. But the landscape was soon littered with broken failures – the majority of men who failed to strike gold. You can see them in the “westerns” – the cowboy movies.

Today, our landscape is similarly populated with many young men who went into trading hoping to become overnight millionaires but did not achieve their and their families’ dreams. So they remain poor – and illiterate on top of their poverty -- because they have no skills. Even when they strike it rich, their wealth is not always useful to society because it is not applied to the quest for knowledge.

So education – the very pathway out of poverty – has been jettisoned in favor of shortsighted choices that only perpetuate poverty. The falling standards in education in ill-equipped schools that lack trained teachers, have no laboratories or libraries because the state has reduced its investment in education, schools in which young women make “runs” (prostitution), young men steal and maim as cult members, and both pay lecturers for grades, has only compounded the crisis of education in our increasingly illiterate society.

Yet, it is no coincidence that the great men, who led our struggle for independence – Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief Anthony Enahoro and so on, were educated intellectuals and professionals. It could not have been any other way. The struggle against colonialism was a struggle of ideas, anchored on knowledge of human rights and the decolonization provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, and the right to self-determination – and the ability to apply it all intellectually and politically for the greatest effect. The newspapers that the Great Zik founded – including the West African Pilot, whose motto was “Show the light and the people will find the way” – were among the main instruments of the mobilization of our people. Lest we forget, we are free people today because of the power of knowledge.

Having found freedom, what have we done with it? We have moved from our immediate post-colonial society, in which education gave us the hope and the manpower for real development, to a society in which we have abandoned the pursuit of education and the knowledge it brings. The worship of money and material wealth – however acquired – has taken over. This is a product of a poverty of the mind and the imagination. We have, in effect, disempowered ourselves.

And so we have in Nnewi today a philistine culture in which intellectuals, instead of being encouraged to provide guidance to the community, are as a general rule, resented. Our youth see only the wrong role models because those who have knowledge have been cowed into silence, while the philistines, the sort of people who the Great Zik once described as “non-entities and empty-headed entities”, take over the public discourse in our communities.

No society can make progress this way. Nnewi has been held back for far too long by the prophets of the illiterate society. It is time for us to embrace the knowledge society.

As I said in the beginning, adopting the vision of “mmuta bu aku” holds the key to our progress. The key is not “mmuta” (knowledge) in and of itself. Nor is it “aku” (wealth) standing alone. The two, independent of each other, can never attain their full potential. The keyword is the verb “bu” (“is” or “as”): knowledge is (or as) wealth. That is what the knowledge society is all about.

What, then, is the knowledge society? The knowledge society is one in which knowledge, not characteristics such as physical brawn or social class, or traditional groups such as farmers or craftsmen, or individual production, is the driving force of economic activity and social transformation. In a knowledge society the older measures of competitiveness such as labor costs, resource endowments and infrastructure get superseded by dimensions such as patents, research and development (R & D) and availability of knowledge workers.

The phrase “knowledge society” was invented and popularized by Professor Peter Drucker, who was unquestionably the number one management guru of the twentieth century. In his famous Edwin L. Godkin Lecture at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1994 titled “Knowledge Work and Knowledge Society: The Social Transformation of This Century”, Professor Drucker sketched the emerging knowledge society and its characteristics. I will draw partly on Drucker’s exposition.

To begin with, formal education is essential for knowledge workers and the knowledge society. You can’t be part of the knowledge society if you haven’t gone to school, for that formal education is what gives the knowledge worker access to work, job, or social position. This kind of education cannot be acquired through apprenticeship. Education is the nerve center of the knowledge society.

Second, the education we speak of here is not limited to formal education, but includes continuing education offered in the workplace or elsewhere. But formal education will be the foundation that makes the knowledge worker a lifelong learner, adapting to new learning technologies.

Third, knowledge societies, such as already exist in North America, Europe, Australia and parts of Asia, are necessarily much more competitive societies. This is because the performance of individuals, organizations or countries in acquiring and applying knowledge will determine their overall performance, their role in the pecking order, and, indeed, their very survival. This is the secret of the divide between rich and poor countries – the relative importance each group attaches to the human brain as a resource. The brain drain from developing to developed countries, one of the most fundamental obstacles to Africa’s development, illustrates this point clearly.

Fourth, knowledge in the knowledge society is only as good as the application of it. In the United States, and even in Nigeria in the 1950s and the 1960s, a person with a liberal arts education was what was considered a truly educated person. This knowledge was for personal development, but had little practical application. In the emerging knowledge society, knowledge exists largely in its applied form.

Fifth, since applied knowledge is always specific, specialization is a crucial component of the knowledge society. The era of generalists is dying. To be an effective member of the knowledge society, an individual must have specialized knowledge. Think, for example, of the x-ray technologist, a neurosurgeon, a securities lawyer, or a procurement and supply chain specialist in business.

In the industrial and post-industrial society it was enough, for example, to be a lawyer for all things and for all people. In the knowledge society the efficient division of labor means that an international lawyer specializes in transnational transactions while the personal injury lawyer is on the lookout for the victims of careless people, hospitals or workplaces. In the past, the typical business in Nigeria was named something like “A-Z & Sons Ltd., General Merchants”, and it was only necessary to obtain a degree in “commerce” to be an educated trader. Today, the ubiquitous MBA degree – and the specialized fields within the study of business administration – is one of the indicators of the movement to a knowledge society. The more specialized knowledge is the more effective it is.

This does not mean that we should not know about areas of knowledge outside the ones in which we are experts. Indeed we must, for knowledge is not totally compartmentalized, and the knowledge in one area very often impacts another. So, part of being a knowledge worker is the ability to assimilate this kind of cross-cutting knowledge.

Sixth, as Peter Drucker emphasized, the knowledge society requires people to work in teams, which means that knowledge workers must work as part of organizations. Effective organization, in turn, requires effective management. Two weeks ago, I was having lunch in New York with one of our distinguished Nnewi-born professors. As we exchanged thoughts on the state of our society and how we can turn it around, he complained about how, as we all know happens, there would be these sudden announcements on the radio that this Governor or that Minister was inviting so and so stakeholder group for a meeting later that same day –or, in the more charitable case, the next day!

This illustrates one of the most important reasons for our underdevelopment -- the absence of planning and efficient management. We are permanently in the ad hoc, last-minute mode! When will those invited for the “meeting” I referred to prepare adequately on the subject matter? Has the governor received a solid briefing note on it? Can these kinds of meetings lead to real progress? The answers to these questions tell us whether we have left the illiterate society for the knowledge society – not to mention the fact that it is indeed debatable whether we have had the benefit of an intermediate, industrial society. (But my boss, the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, has frequently asserted that if Africa and much of the developing world can cross the “digital divide” through the availability of, and training in information technology we can leapfrog into the knowledge society even without having had a fully developed industrial society.)

Next year, Ghana will celebrate the 50^th year of independence as the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to become independent. Like Nigeria, Ghana has had its “years of the locust”, but perhaps more than Nigeria, it appears serious about its future. Demonstration: a year in advance, the yearlong program of activities to mark this historic year of 2007 in Ghana has already been planned down to the smallest details, down to the week in which Nelson Mandela will visit and the one in which the Oprah Winfrey show will be broadcast from the Elmina Castle from which many slaves were shipped off to the “New World” of the Americas. Planning, Organization, Management.

Seventh, patents and other kinds of intellectual property are the engine drivers of the knowledge economy. This is not surprising, for where knowledge is wealth and power, and is relevant only in the application of it, it follows that the value of such knowledge is very high in economic terms and it therefore worth protecting. Thus was the modern system of patent law and protection born six centuries ago in Italy, followed by England, even before what we now know as the “knowledge society”.

Patents provide incentives for innovation, which is why companies in the knowledge society spend huge sums of money on R & D. We know that the absence of economic incentives for patents in Nigeria is one of the important reasons why our society remains poor. I have read in the Nigerian press how Engr. Ezekiel Izuogu manufactured the prototype of a car, but is that car on our roads in Nigeria today? The last I read of this matter, armed robbers had broken into his factory in Owerri and stolen his invention!

The objective of every keynote address must be, in the end, to offer guidance on the way forward.

The first step is for ndi-Nnewi to develop a new worldview. What do I mean by this? A worldview in the sense in which I use the term means a proper understanding of who we are as a people, where we have come from, where we are going, and mostly importantly, exactly how we are going to get there – all in the context of the dynamics of the world today and the trends shaping what that world will look like tomorrow, and our position in the world of our vision. This calls for serious, strategic planning, for worldviews are never neutral. A worldview enables those who have it to establish what at first are subjective decisions, ambitions and visions as objective and unchallengeable facts.

All the advanced and rising civilizations and economies, be it those of China and India, or the United States and Europe, are underpinned by a worldview. That is why, terrible as it was, slavery and colonialism happened in history. Because a worldview of racial superiority was developed, it was supported by technology (the invention of gunpowder) to achieve the subjugation of Africans for economic benefit. Knowledge is power.

Second, a new worldview in Nnewi must be accompanied by a new value system. I mean a value system in which we do away with the worship of materialism. We must avoid the example of the Sophists of ancient Greece who believed that materialism and worldly success were everything. I mean a value system in which we respect knowledge, acquired through education, as a high value. I mean a value system of “mmuta bu aku,” in which education is seen as the key to timeless wealth – the wealth of the mind, the spirit and the soul. Without this kind of wealth a society has no balance. Material wealth alone is not wealth in a real sense. It is a mirage of wealth, for it generates not growth but class conflict and self-destruction (the “wealth” of the few and the poverty of the many – just think about the rise of armed robbery in Nnewi and the Nigerian society as a whole).

Value systems must change again, this time for the better, just the way they changed for the worse after the Nigerian civil war, for Nnewi to make the shift from illiterate to knowledge society. I submit that one particular aspect of Nnewi’s malaise that we must address is that of excessive individualism. Note my emphasis on “excessive”. We must have that individual drive, to be sure, or else we would be in an unnatural, communist society. But we must temper it with moral values such as respect for elders and authority as was the case in our traditional society and is still very much the case in the civilizations of Asia, as well as a commitment to the progress of our society. The pursuit of individual advancement that is emptied of moral and behavioral values is nihilism, pure and simple.

Third, we must now begin to channel Nnewi’s material resources to knowledge creation. This means that Nnewi must begin to reverse the trend of the illiterate society by making the availability of high standard education for its people a priority. When I speak of channeling Nnewi’s material resources to education, I mean private resources. The state cannot do it alone, so waiting for the government to come and do it for us is to wait for Godot.

To invest usefully in education, we need to invest in the right kind of education. We have a number of secondary schools and the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital in Nnewi. What we need is not more schools or universities, but (a) well-equipped schools and (b) the right type of additional schools. Under (a) we need laboratories for the proper study of science, computers and libraries to expand the horizons of our knowledge and connect us to the modern world. Under (b), what we need now are post-secondary technical schools to train people in information technology, health and industry-related technology and other kinds of technical skills that are necessary in order to produce knowledge workers.

Fourth, Nnewi professionals and organizations must lead this shift. This Convention has sown the seed. We need to water that seed into a tree. And that brings me back to the element of organization and management. The NUSA 2006 Convention must bear concrete and practical results. NUSA must institutionalize its relationship with the key players that make things happen on the ground in Nnewi – the local government, the Igwe and the Obis, and the umbrella Nnewi community groups nationwide – to map out the establishment of Nnewi as a knowledge society by 2016. NUSA must sell the vision of the knowledge society to Nnewi at home and help establish it. That ought to be the greatest benefit from your sojourn in America.

Fifth, let me say a word about philanthropy. In our current context at home, we cannot create an education-centered knowledge society without organized, institutionalized philanthropy. Can you imagine America as a knowledge society without the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, MacArthur Foundation, and thousands of other philanthropic organizations and wealthy individuals that generate knowledge creation by providing material resources through scholarships, research grants, and university endowments? Impossible!

We all, of course, know about Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft Corporation. There are three interesting facts about this man. One, Gates is the world’s richest man. Two, he is a knowledge merchant. Knowledge is his business – Microsoft is one of the world’s greatest windows to knowledge and so is a staple of the knowledge society. There can be no greater illustration of the theme of this convention-- that education is timeless wealth, the wealth that endures. Three, Bill Gates is the world’s greatest philanthropist.

These three characterizations are interconnected. They are not random chance. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has an endowment of $30 billion, Gates and his wife have donated $10 billion to philanthropic causes – education and the provision of technology to schools and public libraries in the United States, public health -- especially the fight against AIDS, TB and malaria abroad -- over the past decade.

Just two weeks ago Gates, whose ambition is to give practically all his money away to the advancement of humanity before he leaves this world, has announced that he will be retiring from Microsoft in 2008 to devote the rest of his life to philanthropy. As if all this was not enough to inspire anyone, just one week ago Warren Buffet, the world’s second richest man announced a gift of 85% of his $44 billion fortune, that is $37 billion, to charity. Buffet gave the largest portion of that gift --$31 billion – to the Gates Foundation. Is this not amazing?

We have our relative versions of Bill Gates in Nnewi today. I challenge them to join the fight to save Nnewi from the self-destruction of the illiterate society. Some of them support our collective vision, and have acted in concrete terms. But others need to do so. And much more needs to be done.

This is the clarion call to us in this generation – to mobilize and bury the illiterate society and usher in the knowledge society. In 2005, seven years after the passing of our late father, Isaac Moghalu, who was one of Nigeria’s pioneer diplomats in the 1960s and was also a Permanent Secretary and a man who loved knowledge and helped many obtain education, with the strong support of several other members of our family I established the Isaac Moghalu Foundation in his memory.

The Isaac Moghalu Foundation supports the education of underprivileged children in our rural communities. We do this through scholarships (the Isaac Moghalu Memorial Scholars Program) for secondary and university education and a number of other programs such as a book club, the planned Isaac Moghalu Memorial Library, and an educational institutions support program. In December 2005, the Moghalu Foundation was formally launched and we began fundraising for the establishment of the Isaac Moghalu Library. This is a major undertaking. We welcome and appreciate any support we receive. We hope that the work of the Moghalu Foundation will complement other similar projects by NUSA and others.

The Isaac Moghalu Foundation has joined the fight for the soul of our society – the education of our children and the creation of a knowledge society. We are thinking globally about Africa’s place in the world. And we are acting locally to help bring about what Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe called a “renascent Africa” – the future of which Africa’s children can look to with hope and opportunity.

[*] Ph.D. M.Phil. M.A. B.L. LL.B. Member, the Redesign Panel on the United Nations Administration of Justice System, United Nations, New York; Author of Rwanda’s Genocide: The Politics of Global Justice (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Global Justice: The Politics of War Crimes Trials (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2006); Chairman, Board of Trustees, Isaac Moghalu Foundation, Nnewi, Nigeria. The views expressed in this speech are the personal opinions of the author.