You Deserve Your Leaders!

He quickly cobbled up a press conference and lashed out at the parents complaining about the conduct of the examination, calling them disgruntled elements, and challenging them to come up with evidence.

Using their X handle, JAMB threw caution to the wind brazenly attacking those who pointed out lapses in their conduct of the examination. Intriguingly, an examination body of that standing couldn’t string few words together to create passable correct sentences in English Language without juggling up tenses like a Chairman of NURTW.

That should have been a warning to us that that body lacks the skills-set to test our children on the Use of English, and by extension, lacks the competence to conduct examination in this time and age. That is, if we are a discerning people. Unfortunately, stymied in our ethno-religious and partisan primitivism. We see no evil. We hear no evil. We rubber-stamp everything.

Watching the Professor Registrar meowingly and slowly consume his humble pie yesterday like a stray cat beaten by rain, made me angrier. That JAMB blamed God for their gross ineptitude should pass at the 8th wonder of the world.

But we are a conscienceless bigoted society. Yet obsessively religious. That’s why acknowledging his incompetence is not enough. Apologising for wrecking the future of hundreds of thousands of teenagers is not enough.

 Saying the affected students would be allowed to retake the exams is neither here nor there because examination is both an intellectual and a psychological process. There is what is called examination mood after preparing for an exam. It is not same as a quickly forced one.

Why am I this angry?

First, many of you worked so hard to disparage parents for expressing their feelings and recounting their ugly experiences. Many of you who are also parents even took it a notch higher by shaming parents for taking their kids to exam centres, attacking parents for being parents.

Some of you shamelessly used your default suffering which is already ingrained in your DNA as material to boast by telling us how in your time,  at 16 years age, you left Warri by night bus and arrived Lagos by 4.00am to take your JAMB same day and head back to Warri with next night bus.

All these were to invalidate the experiences of the parents and guardians who asked basic questions every responsible parent should ask. They were shamed for being just parents. Has the definition of parenting changed from “the raising of children and all the responsibilities and activities that are involved in it”?

As if that wasn’t enough, after the release of the JAMB results, and it became apparent how poor it is, a so called Minister of Education (of all ministries) went on air to boast with the dismal performance of students, alluding it to ongoing efforts by the Bola Ahmed Tinubu led administration to weed out examination malpractices in the country.

We heard of the poor young lady that took her life because of her poor showing in the examination. But what we have not heard, and may never hear are thousands of traumatised teenagers whose lives would never be the same again.

Some are already going through undiagnosed and never diagnosed depression that would manifest in their 30s or 40s. Incompetence, especially institutionalised incompetence as we have in Nigeria with our full support leaves trails that are transgenerational.

Have you bothered to know why the majority of us, the generation Xers and Millennials are the way we are? Have we bothered to know why many of us are always too eager to take sides with our oppressors?  Yea also, when he that is a fool walketh by the way, his wisdom faileth him, and he saith to every one that he is a fool”. —Ecclesiastes 10: 3.

From the outcome of the JAMB examination and the revelations that followed indicating that the South East was majorly affected, would it be wrong, using the Minister’s comments to allude that the efforts to check mate examination malpractices were targeted at a particular region?

You see how speaking without thinking can open the gateway for more thinking explorations around what was said that was not verbalised?

Imagine how long JAMB has been this incompetent without anyone taking notice. Imagine how many kids whose lives and ambitions have been twarted by an examination body that was struggling to push out correct sentences in basic English Language.

“There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth from the ruler: Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth” —- Ecclesiastes 10: 5-7.

You deserve your leadership.

–By Kelechi Deca