WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com | justme4justice@yahoo.com
The broken story of Ejikeme Mmesoma and her UTME result forgery in the past days holds a lot for the country if only we could concentrate on the substance of the event. This will enable us to harness the import, the lessons, and even the consequences if not effectively handled. The whole episode has gone beyond the person and act of the young woman, Mmesoma, to a manifestation of indwelling national menace that requires a concise response in the form of a state of emergency.
Her case wouldn’t be the first time we are reporting examination malpractices in the country; in fact, occurrences of examination malpractice has become the norm with us in the country rather than a strange event. Hardly do we have examinations free of successful manipulations outside the UTME examination because of the secured, computerised system of the examination. Outside that examination, every of our examinations, including the ones in even our most rated institutions are as poked with infractions from both within and without. Perhaps, this case will awaken our national consciousness to the need to fight examination malpractices in the country.
Before and again from the days of Salisu Buhari’s fake Toronto certificate in 1999, we may not be able to count the number of politicians in the country who had been accused of and alleged to have presented fake certificates at all levels. While we have citizens faking certificates for all purposes, politicians do the same for political reasons, until it has somewhat been normalised. This girl had a prompt; something imposing the possibility of successfully getting away with faking the result and standing everyone up to accept the forged result.
But now, we have gone steps ahead of where we used to be; the audacity of committing a crime. And that is what bothers me. We have over the decades and through self-imposed processes, built corrupt systems brick by brick until all corners of the nation Nigeria is permeated with individuals who only would survive by scamming processes, circumventing allowable and permissible processes and getting results through unknown to legality routes.
This girl would become our case study as we x-ray the rot of illegality and circumvention of legality in the country. It is not news that pupils writing primary six common entrance examinations in the country now pay examiners to get access to questions beforehand or outside the examination hall during an examination session. The once great WASSCE questions can now be paid for online and accessed online days before examination; and for those who could not do that, the examiners and school administrators are waiting to cash-out from allowing self-help of all manners during the examination. In our tertiary institutions, the slogan is that a number of lecturers have a price. No wonder, in the last one year, we witnessed the incidents of two graduating students of our universities who openly declared that exam malpractice took them this far. One of the cases happened at the famous University of Benin.
Malpractices are infractions on systems; and when these infractions go unchecked, systemic disorganisation paves in. This is exactly the situation in Nigeria today. We began to see the corruption of each and every of our systems as smartness and rather than frowning at repeated attempts to bypass legalities, we celebrate successful infringements on our systems. We make lords of those who successfully stole from the national purse, and humiliate the patriotic ones who would rather stay on the path of legality and honour.
Now, in Nigeria of today, how many of us are innocent? Let them cast the first stone at Mmesoma. We are all guilty of the same offence by compound nomenclature, though we are not yet caught. Mmesoma is guilty, but she is a victim of our collective criminality.
At this point, what we should see as a country is the rot that needs to be addressed if we are truly serious at effecting some changes in our lots as a people and a nation. There wouldn’t be any manifestation of a renewed hope, if we are still the same people who would rather circumvent systems at any given opportunity.
But we are not seeing that, or rather we don’t care to see that. Our sincere target is not a great Nigeria, but self-satisfying, compromised but profiting systems. All fights, protests and activism are never for the sake of Nigeria. We lost out already on the import and the lessons from the episode, and by any chance, wouldn’t be unable to help the country get rid of this usurping cankerworm.
Our immediate responses to the Mmesoma revelation are as divisive as all the other paths we have chosen to take as a people over the decade that brought us to the point we are now. We went different ways on the side of tribal affiliations; finding grounds to defend a national assault on the back of needs to protect our failing myopic fixations on what divides us. Every rightful reprisal of the girl from non-Igbos was simply concocted as an attack on the Igbos, while the Igbos became careless of the implication of the committed crime to the extent of beaming attacks on national institutions that refuse to toll their path. JAMB was painted in all the bad light, even the respected corporately responsible organisation as INNOSON would ask JAMB to let the poor breathe in defense of the girl.
The social media went agog, tribal sentiments and fighting broke out; and again, the vulnerability of the country Nigeria to self-inflicted destruction by its own people fighting to protect their regions by all means at the expense of the country is manifested. Even political figures seized the opportunity to score cheap but destructive political goals.
Mr. Keyamo, aid to the immediate past President Buhari came out to admonish Nigerians to take the route of assisting the girl to realise her error and correct it through proper correction, counseling and guidance, rather than continued criticism of her act. And by all ramifications, that sounds like a noble and fatherly disposition to the travail of the girl in question. In attempting to help the girl, we would have saved her and as many others who would chose to learn from her ordeals; unfortunately, political jobbers and opportunists like Aisha Yesufu wouldn’t allow the issue to go down without taking advantage of it to please her principal and the Obidient mobs.
The best Aisha Yesufu could contribute to the plight of the girl and the implications on the Nigerian youths and society is to unbundle yet their ill-woven conspiracy theory of a stolen election; the conspiracy theory of forgery and rigging accusation against INEC and President Tinubu.
We are now reduced to a population that feeds on the spoil of criminalising and undermining our institutions. The Labour Party and all its minions are busy destroying the credibility of INEC because the party wasn’t declared the winner in an election where they came a distant third; the same people constitute the bulk of the population that would undermine the credibility and effectiveness of JAMB to defend the defenseless Mmesoma.
You see, when the likes of Aisha Yesufu and other self-decorated activists are bent on chipping away at anything as long as it brings popularity and ready cash inflow to them, our country would continue to suffer backwardness and increased loss of values of the kind we witness in the Mmesoma case.
The next institution to come under the hammer would be the judiciary; as far as the Labour Party Obidient mobs are concerned, the only acceptable pronouncement from the judiciary would be the one that would unseat President Tinubu and return the third place Peter Obi as president. When that does not happen, as obviously it wouldn’t, we would have three critical institutions concurrently under the hammer in a nation that needs all its systems to coordinate purposefully and the people to trust the systems as an aid to more effectiveness.
Peter Obi and his Labour Party had their days at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal and yet would not drive the narrative of a rigged and stolen election that Aisha Yesufu had weaponised. Rather than proving to us how the election was stolen, they are dragging an already confirmed issue of Mr President’s educational qualification, his already vindicated case of a civil forfeiture that happened decades ago and all the sensational irrelevancies that allow their principal to remain politically relevant to his blind following mob.
These are the same people who have chosen to run the country down on the back of their call for Biafra. And in their shallow mindedness, turn their entire region to a shadow of itself, with killings and economic meltdown. Thinking they are pulling down the country, they are destroying their region, and it appears there are no sensible elements to call them to order. We were all in this country when MKO Abiola was in jail and we didn’t see the Yoruba taking arms against the system or self–destroying; rather, they engaged international diplomacy to turn the military government into an international pariah until Abacha was forced to offer Abiola a bail, though rejected. We saw the same in the case of Mohammed Abacha who was in prison for three years; the Kano elders took the path of diplomacy by approaching the then President Obasanjo to get him released.
Why won’t these people realise that this is one indivisible country? When would they learn that every attempt at destroying Nigeria would have a shared catastrophic effect on all, them inclusive? Let us all learn from our errors, take the part of correction, readjustment, and sanity to birth a new nation for all.
JAMB deserves commendations and I offer one. The innovations from the present leadership, including its proactiveness and being unwavering are worthy of emulation by many other public agencies. Another consideration will be for it to seek strategic collaborations with other agencies as additional layers of security. This is because the criminal-minded, both young and old are ever active in their scheming.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
