Consolidation of Cheapening Era

By Akin Owolabi

Gone are the days, and they appear gone forever, when, as the saying goes, women were women and men were marrying them. It is really funny that I, even I, could reminisce on those days which to me were glorious. Oh, I find myself getting much older than I really am. What a wonderful thing to be immersed in the current happenstance and yet be able to take a hindsight of the recent past that seems to be yesterday and yet the present generation could not see the very things that gnaw my effervescent mind.

I sincerely hope I could become a video of sort, posted on the ever suffusing social media for all to watch without burning an iota of data. This, in itself, portraits me as a modern man though deeply rooted in what looks like some dark  old days. I wish I could communicate better without rigmarolling. True, I feel so young as a septuagenian and at the same time older than my actual age by about the same years of my sojourn on the earth. Condescending and yet broaching the haughtiness, yes, pride that goes before a crash. I need some respite.

Briefly, I sat for the General Certificate of Education ordinary level at age 29 and the advance stage at 30. Got a diploma in journalism two years after and began prospecting for a degree almost immediately after the Daily Times training. But then there were halls of residence at the University of Lagos – El-Kanemi, Henry Carr, Amina, Moremi and others. That glorified nomenclature has caved in under the heavy buffeting of its secondary school status – hostels. The Unilag parents’ association even planned a multi-storey ‘hostel.’ Students attend lessons instead of tutorials and write their names as their primary school teachers did – i.e Owolabi Akin – without setting the surname off with a comma. The known tradition of name writing has been discarded for the pedestrian primo-secondary genre and the corruption has percolated the entire system like a cardiovascular seizure. The capillarity is such that university professors,  I am not saying there are professors outside the four walls of the university system, have been bitten by the wrong name-writing bug. Would Professor Wole Soyinka condescend to casting his golden name as Soyinka Wole?

This may appear trite but it is true. A deputy vice chancellor (academics) of a prestigious university distributed his business cards to visiting journalists with his name grotesquely written – surname donning the garb of first. A former college of education provost would take serious aversion to the rejig of his name to the normal sequence. The surname must come first and other names follow in a way that says the surname is the first. The reversal in this sense is becoming almost total and national among the present generation. Enter the era of ‘carry-go.’

In our days, though contemporary, secondary education prospecting pupils are entirely on their own. The largely unlettered parents just work hard to provide the money. In 1961, I can recall travelling from my hometown – Ikare – to Ado-Ekiti to write a secondary school entrance examination unaided and unaccompanied. Today, the scenario is appallingly different. Rich or otherwise parents ferry their university admission seeking younger ones (kids, sort of) across the country to write the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination and the post-UTME tests accordingly.

Such rabidity is encapsulated in these two innocuities. A semi-literate parent accompanied his first son from Ota, Ogun State to Ile-Ife, Osun State to write UTME during the era of crazy assigment of computer based test centres, CBT. The parent relished his paternal care when he had to ginger the candidate at zero examination hour. The following year, it was the turn of caring mother to lead the way to the Covenant University CBT, some five kilometres away, for another year’s UTME.

Another instance – an illiterate mother had to accompany her daughter to Ilorin, Kwara State from Ota to write post-UTME at the University of Ilorin. The candidate, who could have conveniently written the test at near-by Ikeja, Lagos State centre, failed. No qualm. In both instances the candidates could not sail through

Do we then blame parents who would drive with their children to secondary schools and wait patiently in the school premises while their prospecting little ones write entrance examinations? Who would convince such over protective parents that there are no hawks and lions lurking around to prey on their extra-vulnerable young ones.

University degree holders in my early years were a rarity. One could count those who ascended the academic Mountain Everest in a big city on one’s fingertips. In the 1940s, Legendary Nnamdi Azikiwe stowaway to United States of America and returned with a degree (in what?)  to become an instant celebrity. He pointed the way to some others who also returned to Nigeria to rule and romp and reign.

In Zik’s West African Pilot newspapers, higher school certificate (HSC) holders had their mention bestowed, rather blessed with the prefix of inter. meaning intermediate Bachelor of Arts or inter-BSc depending on whether the attainment was in the Arts or in the Sciences.

Sundays at the University of Lagos was a carnival of sorts as the cafeterias served a quarter of extra large chicken to each undergraduate at the presentation of a 15kobo meal coupon. Before my admission into this elite caste at age 32, it was five kobo per meal and when the Murtala Muhammed/Olusegun Obasanjo jerked the meal ticket to 15kobo, hell was let loose. Students went berserk with nationwide unrest and the gestapo – police- laid a couple of them to permanent rest in the engulfing Ali Must Go rumpus. It was then an unmitigated national disaster and shame.

The blood of any fallen undergraduate was precious in national ‘ eyes, as it was and still is in the omnipotent eyes of the Almighty. Akintunde Ojo Hall at Unilag and Kunle Adepeju Hall at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then University of Ile-Ife (Unife) are grim effigies of trigger-happy security agency – the police – in addressing students’ unrest. In very recent times, students relish spilling co-students’ blood in the name of cultism.

Conversely, students are very restful today while the academics (lecturers) have taken the citadels to the brink of total collapse in the guise of incessant trade disputes – strikes – that are hardly justifiable. The end result is the production of half baked graduates who are mal-adjusted for the labour market. In my days, job was not as rarified as oxygen with great height. Few lecturers could afford the car luxury, they hardly peonise the lecture and tutorials with wishy-washy hand-outs. Yet they were contented. The situation is now reversed in the favour of ever truculent lecturers – who joyously populated the middle class and wreak unmitigated havoc on the education system. Gone, too, for good is the academic calendar with the month of September etched in gold for the global resumption of academic fireworks. Then the October rush was real.

The value of higher and even highest academic attainment in the present dispensation has nosedived. The story has changed completely, drastically and graphically too. The parody of the highest university degree (PhD) is exemplified in the assertion of a school proprietress in Ilorin, Kwara State capital to the effect that she could not engage PhD holders as primary school teachers, charging that they were appalling in the spoken English Language. She further charged that they, using the generic they, could not pass primary school tests in English Language. Has education crashed so ruinously?  Call this the peak of arrogance and perfidiousness on the part of that nouveau riche school owner.

Nevertheless, gone are my pre-days when brilliant primary school leavers got ploughed back as auxiliary teachers in their alma mater and their secondary school counterparts enrolled at the junior secondary schools as tutors. That was not the best of times but still better than the new era in which professors are hard put to arrange their names neatly. The plain truth is that these are not the best of times when jaded septuagenarians are politically sprinting and sparing with the much younger generations cheering and watching excitedly from the sidelines.

*Mr. Owolabi is a Lagos based veteran journalist