By Femi Akintunde-Johnson
Did you read the story of the 13-year old girl who sat for this year’s examination of Joint Admission Matriculation Board, JAMB, and allegedly, had to be helped to attempt the computer-based questions. A special centre, allegedly owned by an international examining centre in Lagos, was fingered. One of the invigilators was seen performing the incredibly stupid act of blocking the CCTV cameras with bare hands, while another invigilator allegedly helped to guide the “brilliance” of the young culprit (or victim?) And these tragic scenes were witnessed by other candidates, a little older than the poor girl!
What is wrong with us? Many Nigerian parents should worry about the quality of parenting we are spreading over our children. When a child, barely into teenage years, who should be preparing for promotional examination into senior secondary school, is “manhandled” to sit for university entrance examination…what quality of perspective finds that normal?
Even when she is smuggled into the university system at below age 14, and spends the next 10 years bumbling from first degree to a second, then a Master’s, and then adding a PhD…she will still be below 23! Are we challenging for a page in the Guinness Book of Records?
Of course, most first generation schools will likely not admit the infant teenager, and thus may find space in one of our private universities. If the reality is that the parents are looking for a way to continue to live their lives at their usual pace, the child is basically a time-bomb awaiting contact with other “highly inflammable materials”. It is not an over-stretch to imagine such a toddling scholar straying into drug gangs, sex deviants, cultism and such anti-social indulgences that poorly mentored and abysmally groomed children naturally gravitate towards.
Some children have never spent a week of quality Interactions with either of their parents, since they were always dumped into the convenient grotto of creche-kindergarten-nursery system as from age two, or less!
It may therefore seem normal and “modern” to dysfunctional parents to “file” the child away into the final “incubator” of moral and didactic value dynamics from which, if he ever returns alive and healthy, his marbles may have been unhinged and dislocated…that he becomes a hulking threat to the Nigerian society…a ticking bomb without a detonator!
God save us from irresponsible parents, and the products of their licentiousness.
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Ambode’s Deep Slumber…
Few months ago, we wrote on this column that Lagos governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, who started so well, was apparently sleeping on duty as a result of the political trouncing he received from his godfather, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu in October last year. In that piece (“Is Ambode Still Sleeping?” – December, 2018), we sympathised with the governor’s peculiar condition, and appealed to him to find some grace to finish his one term well, as ruling Lagos is not anyone’s “divine assignment” that would have prevented him from gaining “eternal life” – a fixation of Pentecostals, of whom I believe he is counted amongst.
Ambode seems to have gone worse since my lamentations four months ago! Or his condition appears to be unmoved by the state and national successes recorded by his party, APC, in the power equation. He still “lords” it over Lagos in a poor imitation of Nero, who was strangely infatuated with his harp while parts of Rome withered under raging inferno.
Lagosians have been growling at the ridiculous return of traffic gridlock (an apparition once banished, few years ago, to the fringes of Apapa and its docks – by this same man!) The metropolis is now clustered, and choking at the seams…there is an enveloping sense of neglect, filthiness, stagnancy and lawlessness.
All of a sudden, stories of police brutalities, vicious gang wars, signature cult killings, and such hitherto fast-receeding sociopathic behaviours, are becoming common treats… And our man’s word is mum! Not a note of warning, or sympathy, or inspiration, or condolences… Not to mention the human touch of public appearances or private visitations to victim’s families or communities.
So, we ask again: What is wrong with our governor? Is it more than losing an election? Can it still be the shock of being the first sitting governor to be upended in his own party primary – in a state he is generally adjudged to have done averagely well…until the primary? Is our governor so short-sighted that he is willing to mortgage his political future by muddling the pool in which he had once swum admirably? Is he so blinkered that his ambition is somehow denominated by two-term Alausa tenure? How do you expect a favourable history where you started so well (even when some could point at moments of vindictiveness and arrogance…which to me merely underscore your humanity)…and then end so calamitously?
Have you forgotten the biblical dictum poetically delivered in Ecclesiastes 9:11? Or can you not appropriate its inspired wisdom? Let me remind you, sir:
“…The race is not to the swift
Nor the battle to the strong
Nor bread to the wise
Nor riches to men of understanding
Nor favour to men of skill
But Time and Chance happen to them all.”
Bros, embrace your chance… redefine your time.
