Oromoni: Doyens of Anguish in a Depraved Society
Femi Akintunde-Johnson
In the light of the unspectacular achievement of high-heeled Lekki-Lagos based secondary school, Dowen College – leading to the death of a 12-year boy, Sylvester Oromoni, from complications arising from alleged acts of vicious bullying – the nation’s focus has now shifted to loud and fervent interrogation of the quality and character of our family and educational systems.
Though the management of Dowen College and few parents have insisted that Oromoni, a junior secondary school student, met his unfortunate end as a result of injuries sustained in a football game, practically no one believes that tale. As usual, in such devastating occurrences, Nigerians have been rolling out stories of past misdeeds and crass negligence of the same school – unfortunately, these revelations can hardly succour the bereaved family. Yet, we must learn how to end this seemingly endless waste, and effect prompt justice for the anguish of the Oromoni.
On April 3, 2021, this column, kicked off an eight-part series entitled “Great Country, Poor People”, and warned about the collapsing blocks of quality nation-building all around us – with special interest on the abysmal parenting pedigree of this age; the colossal devaluation of qualitative and meritorious educational structure; and the perfidies of our politics, civic society, ad nauseum. Let me remind us with some thoughts from our recent past.
We opened thus: “’First thing first’, the Family and the Home: This minute unit of the society has been gradually and steadily liberalised and fragmented since the ascendancy of the millennial parenthood. The discipline and firmness that corralled the children of the 50s, 60s and perhaps up to the mid-70s – just before the reckless flush of petrodollars inflamed our appetites and bloated our indulgent stomachs – vanished from our lifestyles. By the 1990s, single parenting was no longer an aberration; the 2000s embraced deviant behaviours – transgenders, same sex marriages and such ordinarily abhorrent lifestyles in years of yore became more acceptable… shattering the landscape for puritans and moralists.
Those vigorous lifestyle paradigm shifts also had influence in thawing the admittedly strong influence of disciplinarian parenting. Children of the latter days were mostly not exposed to corporal punishment, even when they indulged in quasi-criminal activities. Teachers and school owners, concerned about return on investments, held back the rod of correction. Some of the children took cues, and began a reign of terror and bragging conquests. These later graduated into cultism, which in the past decade, has filtered into levels below tertiary education; into thuggery, gang-rape, and assorted acts that question the quality of recent parenting received by our children.
One of our children put this anomaly in a perspective indicating clarity of thought and understanding of the issues. The following extract is culled from the winning essay announced at the 17th Mike Okonkwo Annual Lecture in September, 2016. Fadilah Saliu-Ahmed from Zamani College, Kaduna State stirred reactions from the audience when she said: “The Nigerian child of my generation has grown up seeing corrupt leaders being celebrated. He has learnt that all you need to have to be respected is wealth; no one cares how it was gotten. Hard work and discipline no longer mean much to him.”
Fadilah is even more right today. The children of today have missed the bus of trust; the parents are hamstrung by sundry excuses preventing them from leading by examples – majorly telling the children how to do it, instead of showing them how and why we do it. Any chance of fruitful succession is destroyed with some of today’s children caught violating their own mothers, and killing their fathers for money-making rituals and such sick morbidities….”
The follow-up on April 10, was titled ‘Great Nation, Poor People: Educational Mishaps’: “The second element that has led us to this sorry state is the way we have handled our educational system and policies over the past six decades. In the 50s, before we became independent, we read about the great exploits of our sons and daughters who travelled abroad; or stayed at home, with the few institutions available: same results mostly – excellent grades, inspiring stories of out-witting grinding poverty to grab some certificates. Scholarships were fairly common, and they were judiciously and indiscriminately deployed – irrespective of time and zone. When you merited it, you got served. Progress was easy and predictable…
While we were being steam-rolled into all sorts of knee-jerked governance, our educational system suffered all sorts of devastations and dumping down, to accommodate and compensate for political exigencies, and conceited agendas. Suddenly, idiotic appendages like quota system, catchment areas, deregulated cut-off marks in government-owned secondary schools and universities became a lingo. Thus began the unconscionable socio-cultural marginalisations, where brilliant students from the south of Nigeria could score excess of 150 in so-called common entrance examinations into federal “unity” colleges; and yet would have to queue behind abysmally low scores from their mates from the North of the same country. Don’t laugh when you hear that marks could be as ridiculously low as fifteen (15)! Yes, even much less in some blighted states.
The vastly ridiculous excuse is that those educationally poor states would be completely left behind if they were subjected to the same stringent cut-off, somewhere between 130 and 150! And lumping students who score consistently above 150 with those struggling to get 10 would somehow make the laggards become smart, and mold them into effective and efficient manpower for the development of their beloved states? The answer is staring at us all over the northern states now…
Same is sadly true about the qualification limit for admissions into higher institutions in Nigeria. Though several tertiary institutions claimed four or five credits in one sitting as the least for admission, who would bet his life that more than few have not strolled in with fewer than that number of credit limit? Institutions that are created in pursuit of excellence have allowed a system of deferred corruption to dilute their mainframe by accepting applicants who have fewer credits, and lower marks in JAMB and post-JAMB exams, to come through the cracks, when more excellent students have had to be turned back because they were not born in the correct states, away from a particular university. It’s shamelessly called “catchment areas”. So, some, by sheer force of their all-round brilliance, have forced their way in, while few others would simply adopt the “catchment” states as their homesteads, with their active and wily parents providing the financial and logistical endowments to make the miracle happen. And you expect that child, threatened by a stupid long-held policy, to project love and patriotism in the face of colossal indifference and red-tapeism?
Yet, we have not mentioned the seeming uncoordinated wilful demonisation of public schools by both the state and federal governments. Perhaps it is not deliberate, but the reality is that there have been periodic and relentless policies of denial, demolition, dislocation and de-marketing of the power and presence of public schools, on the altar of the economic and pivotal benefits of private schools. Mostly ill-equipped and overwhelmed by the huge number of private kindergarten, nursery, primary, junior and senior secondary schools in many states, the regulators have simply abandoned any pretensions of curriculum reviews, teaching capacity verification, structural adjudication, and moral monitoring….” A sob!
