P.T.A. REVISITED.

The recent startling revelation coming from all corners that, “Nigerian graduates are unemployable!” is a fact which ought not to be customarily overlooked nor treated with kids gloves. Apart from having the stinking underpinnings of a worrisome situation, the appalling signals clearly spell danger and doom if nothing is urgently done to remedy the situation. It behoves me to write on this issue, because, as an undergraduate currently, I will eventually join the multitudinous batch currently in the labour market, swelling each day like the sands on seashores.



Let's call a spade a spade. The fact remains-and remains as such-that, the educational certificate we come out with will be and will remain a piece of paper. Our education will therefore, unquestionably be the residue we acquired while studying. That said, I recently encountered a first-class electrical engineering graduate who cannot do a simple electrical wiring! To my utmost surprise and dumbfoundness, he had confessed to me that he has never handled screwdrivers while in school. According to him, there was no need for practicals in their school because volumes of textbooks abound that sufficiently and efficiently taught what they were to learn. Unsurprisingly though, it is a well-known fact that we have a lot of graduates who can barely pen down their names. Roadside mechanics have proven to be more knowledgeable in mechanical machines than our first-class mechanical engineering students. Our science students are only acquainted with laboratory apparatus in textbooks. Law students barely appreciate the gimmicks and rituals of the courtroom until they get to law school, which then makes it hard for them to grasp. The reason for this anomaly is obviously not far-fetched. Students' lackadaisical attitudes towards learning has known to be the frontburner why education is on a decline in the country. However, apart from this major factor, I have identified what I believe to be three other factors which add their own grease to the wheels that smother our employability. And these three factors, I wholelabelled: P.T.A. Yes, P for Parents; T for Teachers; and A for Administrators. These three factors individually and collectively contribute their quota towards graduate unemployability.



Well-to-do parents have been known to largely influence their childrens' choice of life careers. The poor ones more or less don't care what their children become because they being illiterates-schooling-wise, will mostly not appreciate what their children do in school. Over glasses of champagne, childrens' fate as to what they will become and how they will become what, will be sealed. The children will never grow up to ever think of becoming something else. Renowned doctors, lawyers and engineers will be the only examplars and models they are acquainted with. Any other 'unprofessional' course is forbidden to be spoken of. God forbid the child says s/he wants to become a musician or a footballer! Such professions are undignified! However, it is not hidden that people in such fields are making good money and repute. The children will then grudgingly have to read what is not their passion and interest. Another attitude of rich parents is padding the way for their children in almost everything that the child is as good as useless when s/he comes out of school. They will bribe their way to have their children be in either of medicine or law, for they believe those courses to be the most lucrative. And when the child has barely managed to scale through the university, s/he will have nothing to offer.



What is the need of sending me on a never-ending journey to find "x" in a quadratic equation, where the value of x is not equal or less than the square root of its mean, taking "y" to be a constant? Of what use is it asking me the cube root of the simultaneous equation which has tan&cos as intergers of the matrix of sine? Such was the impatience of my primary school teachers with anybody who had no head for maths. In fact, they had unhiddenly made it known to us that if you don't know maths, you are doomed for life! Just like the eternal damnation of sinners in hell fire. Not that they were wrong by any means, for maths is very much important in our lives as we need oxygen, but where I've come to class one chilly morning debating in my mind, struggling with my conscience whether to accept Achebe's killing of his hero in 'Things Fall Apart' or not, after an enjoyous reading the previous night and then failing to calculate the circumference of the radius of a circle which has 'x' as its diameter, only for me to receive strokes of the cane says much about our teachers insensitivity towards our welfare. Till date, I am still having nightmares of my maths teachers in primary and secondary school. The females with their ugly, coarse and intelligent faces, while the males with their bloodshot, crinkled and heavily-moustached faces. My teachers will never tolerate you if, should you be unmaths or unscience oriented. Arts, they believed, was meant for lazy students. But students, like me, abound that all our lives we like reading. In fact, I had been such a voracious reader, that I was picking sheets of papers from the ground to read. One day of reading a page of a written word was like one week of straight partying to me. One incident that nearly had me stopped school remains fresh in my memory. I was sitting down on my own one hot afternoon reminiscencing about the novel which I just finished reading, whether to give it a pass mark of 3 out of ten or 1 over 10, when I suddenly felt my neighbour nudging me and pointing to Uncle P, our maths teacher. Unknown to me, Uncle P had asked us to give him examples of whole numbers, and everybody else had given, until it got to me and Uncle P was the type that never repeated questions. I had turn my eyes to the guy behind me, hoping he meant him, but Uncle P would have none of that nonsense. I stood up and muttered, “3 over 10.” I said it because I knew that since it was a maths class, the question would be one that concerns numbers. I don't know where the inspiration fell from, even till today. Uncle P's eyes, I noticed, started emitting little sparks of fire when he called me out to receive my due reward. Whoosh! Whish! was the only sound heard as his koboko went all over my body. My eyes, ears, nose, mouth and my head were all double their sizes by the time I got home. It had to take a week of constant hot-water pressing by my mother before they returned to slightly their normal sizes. I had refused to go back to that school until threats from my father to do more of what Uncle P did took me back.



Ah! Our leaders(Administrators), those ones are as guilty as sin itself. Their barefaced disdain for education in the country is something even the blind can clearly see. Polytechnics are currently on strike, but our leaders, in their usual Hobson choice attitude, don't give a hoot. After all, their kids are in choice schools abroad. Such a brazen display of idiocy like Hitler's, that our leaders are earnestly trying to uphold. For Hitler was reported to have said that, his teachers, apart from a select few, were the worst people in his life, or maybe it is their own hearty conviction which begs for a credible explanation. We were witnesses to the inglorious six-month ASUU strike of the recent past, which untenably halted educational activities in the country. In short, I hold our leaders to be the major culprits in making Nigerian graduates unemployable.



The remedy of the situation is invariably the opposite of the problems herein outlined. Parents should allow their children choose what they intend to become in life, though with a little guidance. "Beyonce" is a course now offered in an American university. If you should enter any bank and say you are the nephew to the cousin of Cristiano Ronaldo's uncle, let me see the bank manager that will refuse to do business with you. There's no such thing as undignified or unprofessional courses. The passion to read a course should be the determining factor here.



Again, our teachers, especially the ones at our formative level, should help guide us, rather than destroy us. Until now, many of my secondary school classmates who joined sciences because they were persuaded by our teachers to do so, are still seeking admission to higher institutions. And this time around, they will be glad to accept admission from just any institution. Perhaps, its because our teachers were meant to teach us academics side by side morals, that they are unable to draw a line between both. They have to impose their ideals on us.



As for the government, theirs is like a malignant tumour. Growing worse each day. Paying only lip-service to education in the country. When a major issue, such as the one under consideration, receives little or no attention from the powers that be, then there is a great chance of impending doom.


On the whole therefore, there is an urgent need to revisit the P.T.A. That I believe would ameliorate the stark inadequacies of graduates to a large extent.


Please if you have a different view, feel free to share with us, as different opinions will be entertained.

LAWYERS, NOT LIARS!

This is an 'article-cum-poem' written by a colleague of mine. I fell in love with it because it seeks to correct a prevailing albeit erroneous belief in Nigerian reasoning faculty.

WHAT GERMANY TAUGHT ME IN BRAZIL.

It isn't as if last night's match between host nation, Brazil and host conquerors, Germany was something out of the ordinary. Far from it. We've seen matches where the hosting nation or club will be beaten by far wider goal margins. Check out the different leagues in Europe and you will see this fact substantiated. Also, countries have fared worse in previous tournaments-particularly host countries. The myth surrounding a country not winning the World cup consecutively is still there, and remains likely not to be broken. At least, football fervents like us never gave Germany that benefit of doubt as to beating Brazil, talkmore of beating them by that 'mother of shoutouts' goal difference. Brazil definitely would have had the extraordinary self-confidence to draw on because they were at home. What's more, what will be the quantitative and qualitative ratio of noise coming from over 50,000 Brazilian fans in a 60,000 capacity stadium compared to the paltry few thousands of German fans? Not to mention the double number of those outside the stadium. By all odds and initiative, Brazil ought to have won the match last night, but the world all over was shocked to see a total and complete reversal of expectations. Very few bookmakers will have willingly and clear-eyedly bet that such a scoreline as was witnessed last night was predictable. As a German player was heard to have confessed after the game,

"We started scoring immediately the game started and we forgot to stop." 

Yes, a whole lot of jokes-some sleazy, some naughty, some not-so-funny, others outright bad-had trended following the match. Trust Nigerians as usual. Nigerians will not be left out of the pack, and so various epithets were created by 'geniuses' to show their disapproval or approval, as the case calls for, at what Germany did to Brazil. The adjectives: sabotaged, mauled, butchered, truncated, obscured did not even come near to describe what Germany did to Brazil on that eventful night of July 8, 2014. Thus, different after different types of ready-made jokes-mostly by Nigerians-began trending everywhere from Twitter to Instagram, Facebook and many other online and offline social and print media. Hardly will you not be accosted with such jokes on your timeline, should you ever bother to check. But trust Nigerians, they will always be at the forefront of the noisemaking without necessarily, looking beyond the surface of the match to see if any lessons can be learnt from the game. Such lessons I believe I have learnt which I intend to share here.

The thoughtful and intuitive observer can, will, and must see through the ordinary theme that characterised the match. Far removed from the ordinary meaning of the match, some deep and insightful lessons will be humbly set out below.

Firstly, the distinction between 'I CAN' and 'I WILL' were clearly enunciated to me in that match. Man, from time immemorial, has been engaged in a perpetual search for gratification, but, however, there always appears those primitive obstacles in life called, 'adversity.' The German team, it appears, recognised the inherent peril associated with this lifes' stumbling block. From the group stages of the tournament, the German team had played with a shared morality of fighting spirit. Their quest for winning knew no bounds. The pysche and credo of the team had been, 'so long as it is a challenge, we would face it.' And so, they had accustomed their mentality towards playing against any 11-manned team while winning was foremostly etched on the fronts of their hearts.

Secondly, the German team had taught me that indeed, 'actions and deeds speak volumes than mere words.' To borrow a leaf from the literary giant, Prof. Wole Soyinka,"A Tiger does not announce its tigeritude; it pounces!" The German team did not need to announce their 'Germanitude', rather, they pounced! My simple message here is that, your Pastor, Prophet, Medicine-man or whoever might say all he has to say about you defeating your stumbling blocks in life which you must face, but my dear, to tell you the truth, it takes you to put in that sheer determination before you will achieve in life. The determination that equals the zeal with which tiny termites put in to build gigantic anthills. No one, at least I am sure, in the duration of the earth, has ever climbed a hill by merely looking at it. Only the man who says failure is his name would never achieve in this journey called life.

Further, the German team had demonstrated the spirit of comradeship paramountly needed in life. The connectivity of rungs in life's ladder. We've heard of many aphorisms and sayings expressing the strength in unity, but the German team had clearly demonstrated that. Other teams were building and focusing their strengths on world bests and future world bests. The German delegation had at the onset clearly shown themselves to be a team without any preferential candidate. Nigeria can learn a lot from this by uniting in one common purpose to fight the onslaughts facing the country. The fourth and final lesson which I learnt will be a matter of conjecture. From the inception of the World Cup till date, any World Cup hosted by a South American nation has always been won by a compatriot South American country. With what I have learnt from the Germans so far, that record is clearly about to remain not so. The German team had thus far played with that degree of passion and zeal which can and will definitely change the status quo. It takes a daring and bold individual to bring about that much-needed change. That passion-filled and dedicated individual. That individual that will see above life challenges and potholes. And that individual, is YOU. Life's lesson, in a nutshell:"Your best self is the most powerful." It takes you to be you. Nobody can do it better than you.

See you at the top.

DAYLIGHT ROBBERY

Nigerians still hold the record for being the most ingenious and creative human beings in the world- especially when money is involved. Living conditions have forced us to resort to all forms of extra-orthodox means in a bid to survive in this highly competitive society. Consider the case of the well-dressed First Class graduate from the University of Ilorin who meets you in Benin and has no transport fare to attend an interview in Kaduna after searching for a job for 5 years (how did he get t-fare to Benin, and what is he doing in Benin?); to the brilliant undergraduate who was on his way to being the youngest First Class graduate in his department in, but had his dream cut short by circumstances occurring beyond his control and urgently needs money to do one surgery or the other.

Then consider the case of the victim of Sharia Law in the North who converted the property of another and had his hands cut off with no visible means of livelihood, other than displaying his mangled limbs to the hustlers and hardworking people of Lagos State. And then the classical case: that of the able bodied man, who has no visible impairment to his morphological structure, nor disadvantaged by any circumstance of his birth, nor any other extraneous act of man occurring beyond his control which serves to be detrimental to his success in life. Yet, he meets you at the park at Ring Road, at Yaba Market, and on the busy streets of Surulere, where you are jejeciously minding your own business with a very sorry face and a cock and bull story (which I like to refer to as Chukwuma and Nwawo tale) about how his Grandmother in the village prevented him from succeeding in life, or the story about his pregnant wife who is currently in the labour ward and needs money to do a ‘Sheasarian Operation’.

Now, how this concerns me as a tax-paying Nigerian citizen (or rather, the son of a tax paying citizen), I can’t say, but these men on journey from Jerusalem to Jericho in search of Good Samaritans are extremely experienced in the practice of getting you to part with your hard-earned naira notes, and have a way of making you feel bad if you can’t help them. Some of them can perform better than most Nollywood actors when recounting their tale of woes. In fact, a Literature student preparing for WAEC can rely on their story to practice how to identify literary elements and Figures of Speech.

Apart from these unfortunate individuals, we also have begging by corporate agencies and respectable business organisations. Many will attest to the fact that hardly a day goes by without you receiving a plea for monetary assistance from these network providers which is couched in an intuitive manner. Consider this message I once received:

“Do you know that sitting down on a cushion chair for prolonged periods can cause cancer of the buttocks? For more interesting health tips, text YES to 3000.”

I am justified in regarding this type of message a plea for monetary assistance because the information they are offering to supply you with is not something not already known to an average Nigerian. Besides, the offer to supply information on a specific subject matter such as health tips is such that someone actually requiring such information will not be helped beyond the rudimentary knowledge he already possesses if he actually subscribes to such service. The better consensus will be for such a person to resort to the internet where he will get a wider range of such specific information at a cheaper rate.

Then when you subscribe to these information services, the issue of renewal of subscription comes up. Here, the network providers cross the terrain from begging to stealing. In short- you won’t be informed or reminded that your subscription will be automatically renewed. They impose it upon themselves to deprive you of your precious 50 NGN airtime for a week of disturbing SMS’s which consume space in our phone storage. Then when you call Customer care to complain of this unwelcome trend, all they have to offer you is their apologies.

Recently, network providers crossed the line from mere stealing to broad-daylight robbery. That is, deducting money from your airtime credit without even informing you that you spiritually subscribed to one service or the other. Many times you just receive messages that your exquisite 50 NGN Airtime credit has been deducted for Caller Ring Back Tune or whatever, and you can’t even remember subscribing to such service, and the funny thing is that it always happen when you just heavily recharged your line after a long credit- drought.

Inasmuch as MTN and other network providers are prepared to continue this brigandry, I am also prepared to continue in my boycott of recharge of my phone lines. Thank God for sophisticated services such as wifi which ensures that I can connect to the internet without the help of mobile networks.

I am Oluwanonso_Esq on Twitter.

THE MONSTER CALLED RAPE

            I guess that my difficulty in being able to write about women related themes in my writings stemmed from the fact that when I had grown to the level of self-realization, my mother who could properly guide me through the mountainous range of knowing and appreciating the opposite sex was no more of this earth, or perhaps because I didn't have any female siblings, or even maybe, because I grew up in a conventional Nigerian family , ferociously grounded in morals, where it would amount to a taboo for a man to ever think of stooping so low to the level of a woman( Infact, God help you if Papa should as much as catch you innocently daydreaming about the opposite sex).                                             I had methodically embarked on a joyous voyage of Thank-God-I-Am-A-Man themed writings. A moment of introspection had awakened in me and opened my eyes to the wonders and amazing world of being a woman. A task which I will not set out here, but suffice it to say that being a woman is a very beautiful experience. That sadly seems to be on a sharp decline as evinced from the various acts of violence against women. Questions after question continually barraged my mind. What if my future wife was someone who had undergone the damaging and traumatizing effects of being raped? What if I am nowhere to be found tomorrow, what will the fate of my future daughters in a world of prejudiced values against women? What if my only sister, had she been alive, grows to become a victim of rape? Worst of all, what if I had been born a girl, who could tell, if I wouldn't have experienced such traumatic moments of being dehumanized and downgraded? As these unanswered questions kept nagging at me, I found myself invariably departing from mainstream Collins; trademark Arikor, who naturally is stone-hearted when it comes to matters concerning the opposite sex. Because whichever way you decide to look at it, the issue of rape touches us all in one way or the other. And then an inner voice told me it was time to wear the shoes of rape victims so as to feel how it pinches; it was time to lend my voice to the dastardly act of rape; This monster called rape.
       A casual glance through daily newspapers will reveal the alarming rate at which rape is now jostling positions with the now 'perceived-normal' Boko-Haram endemic. For every page that reports about the inhuman activities of the evil Boko-Haram sect - which are very many - there is a corresponding page of a rape report somewhere from Abia to Sokoto; Lagos to Kaduna; Ebonyi to Rivers etc. The custom of blaming the act on the devil seems out of vogue now( I believe maybe the devil must have angrily cautioned any rapist to mention the devil at the rapists' own peril). The flimsy and unreasonable excuse now is that the sheer dressing of the victim and her flirtatious lifestyle called for her to be raped!. What sexual appeal, if any, premised on her dressing, a five-year old toddler has can best be answered by the rapists themselves.
            There is no gainsaying the fact that our society is a jaundiced and bigoted one, where the male folk reign supreme. And so we were born into such a defective system, and we find ourselves as men, being tutored to exalt ourselves above our female counterparts-even our elders, thus our lives are shaped by this societally-accepted ill. A judge of the Court of Appeal once captured it concretely when he held obiter, that our own society is of a patriarchal heritage, where everything ought to be done according to the wishes and whims of the man! What a myopic view? And so, the woman finds herself at odds with a father who desires to choose her husband for her, or his 'happy' thoughts whenever he recalls the handsome sum she would fetch as bride price, or even the so-called husband, to whom she is expected to submit however unreasonable his sexual urges are. If the husband ever forces her to have sex against her will, that is not rape! We now have many animals, to say the least, roaming in the body of humans, holding on to their bigoted and short-sighted views that every woman ought to be ravished and subdued. I know my future children - male or female - will not forgive me should they ever find out that I had the opportunity to speak against this evil and I never did.
             In short, the damaging ordeals which society imposes on women leaves much to be said. In a  rape trial not long ago , after the victim had painstakingly narrated the heart-wrenching pains she went through, the judge still dismissed her claim based on expert opinion given by male medical doctors, who opined that she could nonetheless consent to the sexual act even in a drunken state, and because a former girlfriend of the accused had testified that he was a 'gentleman' who would never force a lady to sleep with him against her will. In another scenario, a lady's claim of attempted rape was dismissed because the accused person had only removed his clothes after entering the room she was in and locked the door, when( thank goodness) he was interrupted by someone else. In the words of the judge,"...the actions of the accused cannot amount to attempted rape, for he was only in the process of having a connection with the lady and nothing more...!" Whatever the judge might have meant by 'connection', only him can sufficiently explain, whoever told him that the lady wanted to enjoy the unwarranted and unjustified naked sight of the accused man? In yet another disturbing scenario, a clear and established case was struck out because the accused led evidence, which was easily believed by the court, that prior to the rape, the victim had told him of her numerous earlier sexual escapades and one-night stands with different men. On the day of the rape, she had gone out with him and had started kissing him amorously at some point, which consequently led to his arousal... I guess the judge in this case had no difficulty forming the words: cheap slut! dirty whore!! common prostitute!!! You deserved what you got! There abound cases where women who might be shy or soft spoken are forced to graphically paint the lurid pictures of the ordeal they went through, much to the pleasure and joy of the audience. They will have to re-create the unsavoury scene, from grabbing her against her will, to pinning her down, to beating her up in order to subdue her, to the shredding of her clothing, to the dastardly act of invading the essence of her womanhood, only for such cases to be thrown out on basis of technicalities. All the mentioned instances, are, of course, obtained abroad. I don't have to describe what is seen here, for everybody knows of the absurdity of our legal system.
    We have a further situation where the male folk having adorned themselves with pornography, which basically reduces women to mere vaginas, breasts and buttocks, will set out to experiment what they've seen. And when the desirable becomes unavailable...we have cases of fathers raping daughters, brothers raping sisters, uncles raping nieces and so on. I don't have to tell of the numerous women whose lives have been threatened should they ever speak up against the ordeal they went through.
           The time, I believe, has come when the status quo ought to change. Guys, take my advice, which is a very good antidote. Whenever you see a semi-nude woman, or even a nude one as some of them prefer, just become momentarily blind. Again, this issue of the man having dominion in a marriage or relationship should stop. Granted that the Holy Scriptures designated that the man should be the head of the home, it never said to the point of annihilating the woman! For all I know, marriage is a contractual agreement between consenting adults of equal status. Where then lies the basis of positing that the women ought to submit to the sexual urges of the man, for he owns her, her body and even her soul? If the marriage was premised on a consensus ad idem from both parties, then the consummation of same  ought to involve a consensus from both parties.
Finally, as a word of quintessential wisdom to fellow men, there is a great difference between wishing pain and suffering on someone and actually inflicting such pain on that someone. The traumatized survivors of the various Boko-Haram engineered bombings will easily attest to the truism of the above statement. The pains they go through is not different from that of many a rape victim. Civilisation should be the key word here. And to be civilised, one doesn't have to see the four walls of a classroom. The psychological make-up of women does not allow for such ordeals we put them through, so we shouldn't ever delude ourselves into believing  that women actually enjoy being raped. Even a prostitute takes offence at being called a prostitute, how much more the innocent and decent woman on whom you  unleash your animalistic tendencies? Infact, to say that any man who rapes a woman is an animal would be insulting to animals. It is time to cage that monster between our legs. And if any man feels he is too prominent to obey this simple rule, well, as the Igbo adage goes:"When the hen digs an unfathomable hole, it should not run away from whatever comes out of the hole."



                                                                                                                      COLLINS ARIKOR




AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article owes its inspiration to:
Oghosa Annabel, Victoria Nkechi who unknown to them, readily provided their brains for me to pick, in order to fulfil my selfish ambition of relieving my competency in writing.
Nkechukwu Andrea, Kosisochukwu Goodness and Imosieme Khadeejah for leading me through the intricacies and delicateness associated with womanhood.
Ogochukwu Ethel-who assumed the role of a mother in my life and taught me what every true mother ought to teach her son(s) concerning the female gender.
I am proud to call all these great ladies my girlfriends for showing that being a lady is truly a beautiful experience.

WHERE RIGHTS ABOUND...

Since the primary and most essential duty of every writer is to portray an image of society, I will be basing my write-up around the much needed societal word: RIGHTS, which you might readily take to mean, inalienable entitlements or you will hereaft appreciate to mean a world-known cereal, which is mostly eaten boiled, and which has the botanical name of Oryza Sativa. Whichever way you might get to understand it, don't get confused and don't get mad at me, either, for I am only mirroring what society-our society, particularly-has sadly degenerated into.

I had never really believed the news that filtered out of Ekiti from the last gubernatorial elections, because knowing Nigerians' penchant for exaggerations and misinformations, it wouldn't be surprising to see that the facts and figures which emanated from the conduct were politicised. In every rumour, there is an atom of truth. Well, this one has compounds in it. I was told that Ekiti people were keen to exercise their rice to vote, for they strongly believed their votes were their rice. They had consequently trooped out en masse-defying the scorching Nigerian sun-to cast their votes, so as to secure their rice. Some even had theirs being measured on the hands to them.

As if we haven't swallowed enough shit, another Rice-man went on the prowl. Only that this time around, he seems to be smarter than his Ekiti counterpart. He seemed to appreciate the significant connection between early birds and worms. His advisers knew that of the over 180 million Nigerian souls, over 65% were youths. And so, they had decided to catch them young, unlike their Ekiti counterpart. And what were they to do. Rice-man(or iPAD-man, as you might want to rightly call him), a politically-motivated philanthropist, organised a nationwide essay competition for university students which had 3 iPADS and some sums of money as prizes to 3 winners.

At the last count by Nigerian Universities Commission, we had over 120 universities in Nigeria. And thus, in a no-category barred competition, iPAD-man was sure to have over 2000 students from each Nigerian university vying for the ultimate prize of an iPAD and some money. He was not far from the riveting truth. University of Benin where this writer is a student had two 1000 capacity lecture halls filled to ceiling, and more students were being expected for the essay was to take place on the last saturday of June, which every Nigerian knows in common-parlance as 'clean-up' day. His political do-gooder boys; bottom lickers, were very happy at the wide range of publicity their boss would receive. And so, they were all mouth and teeth that day.

Anybody who wasn't a witness wouldn't readily appreciate the injury suffered by this writer, and why he's complaining, but for goodness' sake! the essay had such a daring and audacious topic as 'Securing Nigeria: Our collective responsibility!' and to think all this while, we have a substantial number of youths who had the idea and knowledge of how to secure a frailing and disintegrating Nigeria and they kept to themselves! We never knew that Nigeria indeed had a lot of 'sensitive' youths who could proffer solutions to the seemingly never-ending issues of the country, until 3 iPADS!-I repeat, 3 iPADS!-brought them out of hiding. Virtually every youth that came out to write the essay in my school had one thing in mind: iPAD and money. For the first time in my well, limited life, I saw Nigerian youths united in one common goal and purpose: iPAD!

I had asked myself, what if on that day, the organisers had sent out a clarion call for all youths to come out en masse and lead a daring and frontal attack on the devious boko-haram sect... Or even to come out so as to protestingly march to government house and register our displeasure at the way our leaders are mishandling the affairs of the country? Only then will inevitable excuses be outdoing each other. It will be foolhardy to ignore the trumpeting aberration on ground. It will amount to the highest form of mental denial to become blind at the glaring and appalling situation at hand.

A very near perfect scenario of Ekiti has sampled itself this past saturday, and is clearly emitting signals of what to expect in 2015.  Why did it have to take an iPAD-motivated test for such a tremendous number of Nigerian youths to show that all along, they had the initiative and wherewithal to secure Nigeria from cascading down the hill of political tumults? Clearly, therefore, it won't take a soothsayer, pastor, prophet or an imam for a true Nigerian to know that the little of this mestasized and festered anomaly called Ekiti is patiently waiting to manifest on a grand scale in 2015, unless-and unless-drastic measures are taken to prevent this oncoming catastrophic head-on collision with doom! Enough is enough on this heavy reliance on rice( oops! rights), before we would do what is right and necessary. This is what you get where rice abounds.