How about legalizing examination malpractice?

If you are surprised at the oddity of this topic, then I can surmise that you are not familiar with the new trend of legalization making wave in the country. I see hope for ‘some’ students in Nigeria since, as reported by Daily Trust and many other media houses across the nation, our ‘dear’ Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has come up with a ‘reasonable’ solution to human trafficking in the country by asking the House to consider legalizing prostitution in the country and his standing was covertly seconded in some ways by the Senate President, David Mark, when he overtly stated that eradicating the ‘profession’ – prostitution, have become somewhat unfeasible, and that in Abuja, commercial sex workers have organised themselves into an organization and are well represented by legal practitioners. At least students can start lobbying for the motion to legalize examination malpractice.

In other words, if the motion to legalize prostitution could be moved, I believe concerned students will want to know why motions cannot be moved to legalize examination malpractice in the country. Since the only excuse given for this repugnant move by the Deputy Senate President was the fact eradicating prostitution has become unattainable. Students, lecturers and stakeholders will agree that wiping out the menace of examination malpractice in the country is somehow unachievable. Boards like JAMB, WAEC, NECO, NABTEB, e.t.c., though will not publicly consent with this notion; they know well that all their efforts to eradicate this malady have become futile. They have hence stopped talking about eradicating it, but reducing it.

For a second, I imagine the period when students in Nigerian tertiary institution will carry more than their normal Students’ Identity Card. Picture a time when students will carry another ID card that reads “Licensed to Cheat.” Envisage a period when students will be expelled not because they were involved in examination malpractice, but because they do not have licenses to practice it. Visualise a situation when students will be expelled not because examination malpractice is a crime, but because they were carrying expired licenses. Imagine a time when students will queue up in the newly formed Examination Malpractice ‘Licensing Bureau’ in the same proportion they queue up for Academic Registration. Students with penchant for engaging in examination malpractice are now not without hopes. Going by the Senate President and his Deputy’s stand on prostitution, it appears all students in the country have to do to get legal backing for examination malpractice is to take the social vice to the level of human trafficking to gain recognition from the likes of Deputy Senate President Ekweremadu.

If the words from the mouths of our noble Senate President and his Deputy are anything to go about, then there is a whole bunch of other legislations awaiting the House. At least, it is common knowledge that corruption in the high places had been legalized, even though unwritten, since 1999. Questions can thus be asked if the recent scourge of ex-governors’ arrest and trials by EFCC is due to the fact that they do not possess the so-called license to steal public funds or because some unseen hands had revoked their license?

It is only in our dear nation that thieves do not only have the prerogative to accuse other thieves, but they have undeniable rights to charge them for the same crime they also are guilty of. Anyone that can see beyond the facade can see that our politicians not only carry a placard of “Licensed to Lie” but also an ID card that reads “Licensed to Siphon Public Funds.”

A popular Yoruba adage says if we intend to scratch our body by the rate of the itches, we will scratch off our skin. If Ike Ekweremadu and his cohorts think any menace that appears unsolvable should be legalized, very soon, we will have national bodies like National Association of Armed Robbers, United Terrorists Front, Nigerian Association of Prostitutes, to mention but a few. And not only that, tertiary institutions should seek accreditation for departments like; Department of Prostitutions, Department of Armed & Robbery, Department of Terrorism, Department of Advance Corrupt Practices, and the likes; all of them presumably lumped under one faculty umbrella, say Faculty of Social Vices.

We all cannot remain blind to the fact that what is bad is bad. If people of political hierarchy like our ‘beloved’ senators cannot think of a better way to curb social ills than to legalize it, then where is the way forward for us? If we lose faith in those that suppose to make laws that’ll move us forward, where then are we going? We cannot run away from the truth just because it stares at us.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous “I have a dream” speech, “... in the process of gaining our rightful places, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.” We should always remember that whatever we seek out of life will be justified not in whether we ended up with it but in how we ended up with it. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for propriety by drinking from the cup of immorality.

Clement Adebayo Oloyede is a student of Department of Mass Communication, Bayero University, Kano. 08069196498, franklydammy@gmail.com

... NOT JUST  SUCCESS, BUT UTMOST  SUCCESS

George Orwell, author of Animal Farm, despite saying 'All animals are equal but some are more equal than others' in the aforementioned novel also gave a somewhat conflicting postulation in another when he said 'We all have equal right to be unequal'. The salient point in these assertions is that whichever way you see it, we are all equal and we all have equal rights to be more successful. And those that become more successful than others only attain this height by learning to utilise their potentialities than others. It is factual that getting to the top is easy after you get through the crowd at the bottom. Don’t be deceived, there is a thick line distinguishing success from utmost success. And for the record, utmost success is not Utopian.

Paraphrasing Charles Kendall Adams, no one ever attains very eminent success by doing what is expected of him; it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required that determines the greatness of utmost distinction. Most people erroneously believe the expectation of lecturers in the forthcoming examinations is for us to give them what folks fondly call GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out. Well, when all we can do as students is doing only what is expected of us, then all we'll have is partial success.

But if we can go beyond the extra-ordinary; make personal researches coupled with what we were taught, without trying to assert our level of intelligence and ridiculing the lecturer's own method of teaching; the outcome of this effort is not just success, but utmost success – success that can withstand the test of time, success that ‘cramming’ alone cannot give. For what shall we say then, after finishing a session with First Class or 2nd Class Upper, we cannot defend this result neither can we impart this (knowledge) unto others; this will be worse than failure.

Let me conclude by wishing everyone of us what we wish for ourselves in these examinations and the examination of life in general. Henry Hazlitt posits that "A strong passion for anything will ensure its success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.” My thought about everyone in this institution – age, sex, ethnic or religious differences notwithstanding is captured in the last stanza of my poem 'Her Open Secrets':

Even when her dreamed 5.00 seems improbable,

She keeps saying it is achievable.

Someone scoffed, "This lady is imaginary."

I replied, "In B.U.K. it's nothing but reality."

ON THE RAGE ON CAMPUS – POP-CORN

Recently, a friend of mine (T-elti), posted on her 2go status this caption: “A virus is widely spreading in BUK new campus. Guess what?” I have to admit, with shame it took me a while to guess right the name of this virus. At last I got it! In my own English: “Pop-cornilisation” – the new form of socialisation on campus.

Let me register my surprise and contempt at the level this socialisation has eaten deep into the skin of most students. And I should quickly point out that my argument is not against the pop-corn itself nor its maker, but at the way students on this campus have turn the development into a thing of disgrace and shame on our  level of education.

I stand to be corrected on my suppositions here, but I remember clearly without any atom of doubt whatsoever that one of the morals imparted in us in our Health Education classes from our primary school level is “code of conduct on the road” of which eating while on the road (walking or driving) was seriously frowned at. It’s now a common frenzy to see students everywhere on campus eating pop-corn while walking. And some have taken this repugnant act to their various classes. My amazement was concealed a little when I saw guys in this act, judging from our carefree attitude; but I was stupefied beyond doubt to realise that our ladies, known for their propriety, are now a partner in this amoral act. This virulent disease is ignominious and its rate of spreading is alarming.

T-elti asked me a question which I am now asking all serious minded students: “What happened to the teachings on thou shall not eat while on the road?”  We as future leaders should be pace-setters of morality not destroyers of established morality.

I should make my standing clear to avoid misconceptions. This write-up, as some shallow minded people cannot but point out, is not an envious write-up against the maker of this said pop-corn. As a matter of fact if given the right, I’ll vote for the maker as the entrepreneur of the year. That being said however, morality shouldn’t give way for westernization in the guise of modernisation; eating on the road is a bad habit which should be frowned upon by all parties involve.

Let us join our hands together to fight this epidemic (eating on the road) before it spreads beyond our control.

TRAVAIL OF MY SOUL

Travail of my soul inclined me towards Beelzebub

Searching for happiness in plenitude

Amassing sorrow in undeserved amplitude.

The things I seek for, I find not, not even meagrely

The things I have are things I do not desire.                                                         5

A sore travail that drench my soul in abyss

Made in me a fistula not by surgery but a hole

By the incessant ordeals that bedevilled.

With thieves and vultures at my back

The storm keeps on twisting with no crack.                                                          10

Confusing me and those with me, my soul

My heart and my body, on the right path to stroll.

With endless unabated weariness coming with the stress

Nothing makes sense anymore than this sweet madness

And what I feel, together, we feel a glorious sadness.                         15

Long years of bitter travails, in my soul, today

Finds a habitat, and its hard at the end of the day.

In search of some distraction, a beautiful release

From this hapless trauma. Hell on earth.

Memories seeping from my vein                                                                               20

Making me empty and weightless, in pain.

Flying, I wish, to meet the soothing angel;

With wings but heaviness in my soul

Weighing me down, truncating my whole.

Weightless and my wings clipped. Crestfallen.                                                   25

Lost in my reverie, in trance I can fly;

Waking up to meet my wings still clipped.

My utmost ordeal will be, not lost love or less;

Not austerity; not failure; not fears of endlessness.

At the end, my travails will guide me to God.                                                      30

A CURSE ON TRUST

Pushing to the edge of understandability

Results in no better thing safe incomprehensibility.

When I open up my heart to you to take a look

All secrets I made open for you like the Holy Book.

No secrets, no hidden meaning, all ambiguities

Explained to give no room for obscurity.

But now all efforts has gone to fruitlessness

For all you left in me is hollowness.

All the while, at every chance, a chance to divulge

The heartbreaking secrets that now in me bulge

Protruding in me like having within a bastard child.

Your secrets couldn’t have made me wilder in style.

Trusting, I will never again, for with you I lost

All that was left in me that could be called trust.

With every moment, my words in your ears I echoed

And repeatedly asking ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

In this poem I’ll inscribe your name for the world

To know who you are. So help me Lord.

Changing from villainy to innocency with a pass;

Haggardly you appear yet with strength unsurpassed.

In too deep your secrecy cuts my skin and leave

Zigzag traces of your cruelty. I trusted you, reveal,

Open my heart to you. Thinking in you lies fulfilment.

Marring my heart like your was built of cement.

At the end, my dear, nemesis ‘ll catch up and I’ll be

Here to do the last laugh and the world will join in.

Even with this, the love I have for you will be

Inscribe in my heart with gold and not just ink.

MIRAGE OF GLORY

Like a wraith it appeared and disappeared in a splash.

A spectre of glory unleashed, withdrawn like a bash

Of fistful force unrestrained and let loosed like trash.

An image of illusionary grandeur with apparition,

It came into sight and vanished like a phantasm.

Phantasmagorically, in sequence it appeared to disappear.

We waited and slumbered, so weak and weary a condition.

We waited in great anticipation of a moment long gone.

Gone like the good old day; we felt undone.

The Holy Book speaks of the latter glory

Being greater than the former. Struggle of gory

With all the blood wasted calling for vengeance.

With so much force we seek for peace in trance.

On the cause of this we seek for the appearance

Of what the latter glory will bring with it in its ambience.

With tears we planted with hope of joyful harvest.

With lachrymosity, morose untethered abreast,

We toiled and laboured not for personal gains, but

We exert ourselves for the glory that lies ahead in the west.

Working our fingers to the bone not to outwit, but

We moiled, paddling in mud, just to standout among the best.

We, like Trojan, worked hard, pulling and prodding under;

We, seeking for something to go beyond the yonder;

When weariness beckons, doggedly with sweat in the heat

We find energy in hope that metamorphosed into zeal.

When failure beckons, with hope of success so real

We thought of the glory ahead and fail to fail with a beam.

We lost love in lust, and find lust in love, all in the dream.

If we knew our glory will be lost in trance, we could

Have forever abided in stupor. Dreaming would

Have been better than living. At least the glory would

Have been realisable. But the reverie could

Not outlast the reality. We awoke to the crude,

Unrefined, barbaric coldness of verisimilitude.

Hundreds of brothers and sisters from the hood

Toiled with us for this optical illusion. As we stood

It’s obvious the glory we seek was a mirage yet so true.

LABYRINTH OF ILLUSORY SUCCESS

(With tears and pains ...)

Through the maze we traverse

On a journey to nowhere safe our destination.

The weather lacerate through our skin.

In too deep, it cuts like the surgeon’s knife.

And at a point, same weather scorched fiercely;

Burning through us like the blacksmith’s fire.

The fire in us unquenchable by the rain;

We traverse through the desert of pain.

Undeterred by the tears on our women's faces;

Forging ahead despite wailings from our children.

Wailing echoing like the ‘Timbrel of Miriam’,

On the zigzag path to success we tread with hope.

Like a rabbit warren, the network of success

Sometimes so difficult to link. Yet this opulence

We seek with blood dripping from our body.

At a point gushing out like ‘Ikogosi Waterfalls’

Body so cold with fever; blood so warm with cold.

I saw blood! Blood of the innocent red as scarlet.

This journey drenched our soul in blood

At a point, we couldn’t move our feet, but

When we think of our destination, we smile.

Standing to face the uphill task like it's no stress

At all. We walk. Walking or dragging, we couldn’t tell.

On this labyrinth of success we traversed undeterred.

Like Elliot in his 'The Journey of the Magi', we too

On this journey, saw death; and there was a birth.

A birth of a new life in us, full of hope & desire.

We walk tall at the sight of fulfilment. If the

Success that had been our plight we can't have

Nothing then is worth having, not women or drinks.

At the gate of success, with regrets we stand,

For it appears our journey has come to futility.

Shrieks of our women and children echoing in our ears,

We've brought them to vanity, for the journey was futile.

With tears and pains we voyaged for vainglory.

The illusory success disappeared like a wraith.