OF WAEC FAILURES AND THE FUTURE OF NIGERIA

There is fire on the mountain, and nobody seems to be on the run, there is fire on the mountain top and no one is a running…
…One day the river will overflow, and there will be nowhere for us to go, and we will run, run, wishing we had put out the fire…’

The above is an extract from the song ‘Fire on the Mountain’ by Bukola Elemide popularly known as Asa in her eponymous album. The song is a call to action and a charge on us all to arrest the rot in the system failing which we will have a heavy price to pay in the future.

My mind went to this song as I read the Newspapers on Thursday, August 11, 2011 with a bold headline proclaiming that of the a little above One Million Four Hundred students that sat for the 2011 West African Examination Council (WAEC) Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE), One Million of them failed the exam.

The report then went ahead to detail the ratio of fail in all the subjects and the catastrophic inability of majority of the students to scale through the Mathematics and English hurdle. I was driving through Owerri that morning and Hot 99.5 FM, a private F.M Station was conducting an audience participation programme known as People’s Assembly on the issue of the WAEC failures.

The majority of the callers were understandably angry. They blamed the teachers, the politicians, the President, the Governors, the students themselves and indeed, everybody available to be blamed.

I hasten to point out that this is not the first time this event is occurring. On the contrary, this should be the fifth year running where students scandalously fail WAEC and NECO examinations. The percentage of failure has only increased each year.

The question then becomes what are the authorities doing to stem this tide? Unfortunately, I don’t see much going on. Two years ago, a large chunk of the budget for the education sector was hived off the year’s appropriation estimate and allocated to the five-lane expressway leading from the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja into the city centre! Such prioritisation.

I am not Nasir El-Rufai. I do not have at my disposal, the luxury of stupefying statistics to buttress my point but I do know that over the years, scant attention has been paid to this debilitating national problem and from all indications, we have moved on to more newsworthy issues until same time next year when we will carry another banner headline proclaiming an even bigger failure rate.

At times like this, I am forced to look back at what was obtainable when I sat for the same examination. I make bold to proclaim that I attended a public secondary school. I attended Sultan Bello Secondary School in the old Sokoto State comprising present day Kebbi State and Zamfara State. I was thought by dedicated and hardworking teachers who took great pride in their work. Our teachers saw us not only as students but their children and wards and they took personal care to ensure that we excelled in all that we did.

My Juniour Secondary English teacher was Mr. Yau Manu Gyamfi, a Ghanaian who took extra care to teach us pronunciations and diction. May God bless him wherever he is today. In Senior Secondary, I was thought English first by Mr. K.W Owusu, another Ghanaian and later, Mrs. K. Ebro, an Indian who wore her Sari with pride everyday until I left that school.

Mr. Singh, a Philipino taught me Mathematics and we had a number of other expatriates mixed with dedicated Nigerian teaching staff who inculcated academic and personal values in us. I have seen some present-day Polytechnics and I dare say that our Introductory Technology Laboratory had more equipments and machinery than these Polytechnics!

At the resumption of every academic term, it was mandatory for us to write essays detailing our activities during the holidays.
We wrote essays on the special features of our localities, the qualities in our friends and our aspirations for the future. We had lots of books to read from. Brighter Grammar Parts 1-4 were my favourites. Books came from Macmillan Publishers and the likes. Schooling was exciting and fun.

A major feature of our Senior Secondary School years was the Inter-School Debating Competition organised by the State Ministry of Education. We competed with Federal Government College, Sokoto, Nana Girls Secondary School, Government Technical College, Farufaru, Government Technical College Dange-Shuni, Government College Zuru and the likes. We traveled to remote areas to debate with their schools in a state-wide competition.

The finals were usually a carnival event attended by the Military Administrator of the State who personally gave out prizes to the winners. I was in the debating club of my school and I shook hands with the Military Administrator for two years in a row as a winner with my school. Today, I don’t know if such things still exist. If they do, nobody gets to hear about them and I don’t know the level of involvement by government.

A little story on how I entered Sultan Bello Secondary School Sokoto will suffice. I had sat for the Common Entrance Examination for Primary School leavers which was then a requirement to get placement into Federal Secondary Schools. I had listed Federal Government College Okigwe as my first choice as my parents wanted me to attend a secondary school closer home having spent all my life as at then in Sokoto State.

When the results of the exam came out, I scored 501 and the cut-off mark for admission into F.G.C Okigwe then was 503. My father reckoned that being an indigene of the catchment area of the school, they would accept me so my mum and I set out by five p.m one evening to travel to Okigwe to see the principal and get me admitted into the school. The journey took all of 36 hours as we encountered armed robbers on our way and had to spend the night in a ditch waiting for the light of dawn to continue our journey.

By the morning of the third day, we arrived Okigwe and headed straight to the school.
We saw the Principal and after looking at my result, he politely informed my mum that I was not qualified to be admitted into the school as I fell short of the cut-off point.

My mum appealed to his pity throwing in the distance we travelled and our harrowing experience with the robbers but no dice. The Principal stuck to his guns. While we were pleading with him, a military officer walked in with his daughter and she had a score of 500. The Principal repeated his apology and turned down the officer’s request to admit his daughter. He pleaded and even subtly threatened the Principal all to no avail.

My mum and I had hung around believing the Principal would admit the officer’s daughter so that we could latch on that and insist on my own admission but after the officer left with his daughter, we knew the Principal meant business and we travelled all the way back without achieving our aim.

On return, we tried the F.G.C Sokoto which had a cut-off mark of 250 but they had exhausted their quota for non-indigenes and unless I was willing to change my surname to Abdullahi, Bello or Usman, there was no way I could be admitted. My father was not that desperate so we opted for second best which was the Sultan Bello Secondary School which admitted me.

Let me state here that I bore grudges against the Principal of F.G.C Okigwe for rejecting me for a long time but today, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish all Principals would be like him.

Today, I am aware that most teachers are frustrated at their job. They feel that they ought to be doing something better with their lives and at class reunions, they are ashamed to state that they are teachers. It was not always so!

These days, cronyism is the order of the day. School authorities defer to politicians and the likes and schools are afraid to fail children of big men so they just keep promoting them until they fail WAEC! This rot can be addressed by going back to the old system of excellence and merit.
Schools should have sports facilities where students are encouraged to engage in sports. That is where their competitive spirit is honed and no self-respecting student will want his mates to do better than him all round.

The advent of social media has come with its own ills. Students now spend time chatting on Facebook, tweeting and ‘Pinging’ on Blackberrys. These can all be educational tools. I am on all these social media and I state without equivocation that they are educative. It is only wrong use of them that has negative implications.

Finally, our governments should do more to enhance the welfare and remuneration of our teachers so that it will not be a flag stop for people in search of a better life. We all have a share in the blame and until we see it from that prism, the malaise will remain with us.

I close with Alfred Rewane’s submission. “When we were growing up, we looked forward to a better tomorrow with hope. Now that I am old, I reminisce on a yesterday that was far better than what I see today”. May that not be our portion. Amen.