Senator Dino Melaye's certificate saga has further exposed our general ignorance as a people about geography as a discipline. While secondary school geography, with its name and appreciation of rivers, mountains, places etc., merely lays the foundation for the academic discipline, the preoccupations of the latter cover the broad issues of development, environment, and other fall-outs of the interactions between man and his environment.
A Geographer is interested in providing explanations on why places differ in levels of development, why people in certain places have a better or worse quality of lives, why the climate is harsher in some places, why vegetation, biodiversity, topography, quality of and access to water, healthcare, education etc vary from places to places. The Geographer not only seeks explanations for these spatial variations but also concerns himself with the implications of the variations on the people and the affected places. As an applied discipline, geography further suggests remedial actions to correct the variations or adaptive measures to cope with the variations.
Based on one's interests and focus of investigations in the very broad discipline, we have subdisciplines like Economic Geography, Population Geography, Health/Medical Geography, Urban/Rural/Agricultural Geography, Political Geography, Regional Development/Planning, GIS, Cartography, Climatology, Geomorphology, Biogeography, Hydrology, Environmental Management and so on. These subdisciplines address geographical variations and processes within the contexts of the human and physical activities that are their prefixes.
By the way, did you know that the creation of People's Bank, Community Banking, LGA/LCDAs and the FCT from the scratch are features of the Growth Pole concept in geography for addressing development inequality? Ever wondered why Prof. Akin Mabogunje, the first Professor of Geography in Africa, pivoted most of these development strategies? Ever wondered which professionals are mostly involved in the planning of population census, cleaning-up of the Niger Delta, behind the sattelite projects, delimitation of political wards, etc? Now you know why geography matters.
Dr. Yemi Adewoyin
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