WAEC, our swollen lips and broken noses

Koko: If I marry a wife for my brother, will I also need to teach him how to sleep with her?

Kaka: Is your brother impotent?

Koko: Impotent? No way, the guy has been pounding yam for years and his pound­ed yam has always been smooth.

Kaka: So, if the pounder, the poundee and the pounded are all doing well, why would anybody need to teach a virile man how to get his wife pregnant?

Koko: My point exactly.

Kaka: What point?

Koko: Why are Nigerians blaming the West Africa Examination Council, WAEC, for the woeful result in the recently released WASCE?

Kaka: Are there people doing that, really blaming WAEC for students failing exami­nations?

Koko: Yes, you haven’t heard?

Kaka: What kind of impotent logic is that?

Koko: That’s like blaming your televi­sion set for showing a bad movie. Really impotent thinking.

Kaka: So, a man sends his son to school in Igboho in Oyo state for 12 straight years and when he fails, he blames the examiners who marked the boy’s papers in far away Maiduguri. What was the examiner sup­posed to do, deploy pity and sympathy in­stead of doing his job?

Koko: Those who are blaming WAEC said the council needs to train the markers.

Kaka: Ah ah, train them on how to award free marks?

Koko: Maybe. You see, free marks will move the dull boys into the league of bril­liant ones.

Kaka: That is another impotent logic. WAEC is just a mirror and you cannot blame the mirror if you find yourself with swollen lips or broken nose in it. It just means that you have a deformed face. It’s that simple.

Koko: Maybe we should just smash the mirror into smithereens.

Kaka: And the swollen lips will go back to normal size as soon as you break the mir­ror?

Koko: Well, maybe not exactly.

Kaka: So what exactly is the point of breaking the mirror then?

Koko: It is disgracing us, making it look like our children have cotton wool where their brains should be. It is making it look like our education policy is impotent and that Nigerian parents are ineffective and grossly irresponsible.

Kaka: That is the first potent logical thing you have said all morning. Neither our children nor their parents are doing what they should do. And our government? I feel like shooting somebody.

Koko: Fortunately I’m here to protect you from yourself. Won’t let you put yourself in prison.

Kaka: Today’s students don’t work as hard as we did.

Koko: Some of them are working harder than we did, trust me. My friend’s daughter had seven distinctions and two Cs in this mass failure hoopla.

Kaka: There are actually more than a few whiz kids like your friend’s daughter but if we don’t produce mass whiz kids, we are investing in a future of mass trou­ble. Because the children who failed will not allow those who pass to enjoy their success.

Koko: So what are the whiz kids doing that the mass failure gang not doing?

Kaka: For starters, when the whiz kids are browsing, they are looking for materials that would help them with physics and eco­nomics, not porn. They are not face-booking, they are facing their books. They are not hung on Instagram, twitter and Whatsapp. They do not write u for you in their essays.

Koko: But they all belong to a download­ing generation. The internet has ruined them almost beyond redemption.

Kaka: I agree but the serious student uses the internet to his advantage. The impotent ones have everything at their disposal but download porn, movie and music. And while they are cavorting with failure, their parents are chasing money, career and power. They leave home early and come back late. Week­ends are for weddings and birthday parties and hanging out with the boys.

Koko: In other words, parents who out­source parenting cannot blame WAEC. If a man can’t knock up his wife , he needs to ex­amine his third leg, not blame his doctor.

Kaka: Gbam!

Koko: The way you sit is the way the cam­era records it. Parents just must start seeing parenting as a career they must succeed at. A successful lawyer whose children are not do­ing well is an unsuccessful man. A mother who is a lady boss feared, revered and respected in the workplace but with a son who fails WAEC exams year in year out is an unsuccessful woman. All the awards hanging on her walls and decorating her massive desk don’t mean jack. They are all reminders of how much of a half-a-woman she is. WAEC cannot be blamed for what daddies and mummies have refused to do.

Kaka: And such daddies and mummies should be made to face the Failed Parents Tri­bunal.

Koko: But we treat teachers like they don’t matter, so they work for us like we don’t mat­ter.

Kaka: And then we blame WAEC. Is it WAEC who pays teachers slave wages? Is it WAEC that makes students learn under trees? Is it WAEC who make teachers feel like the dregs of the civil service?

Koko: In our days, teachers own homes , sent their children to good schools. Today, teachers only see good things happen to other civil servants while they struggle and watch their children drop out of school because they can’t afford school fees of public universities.

Kaka: Maybe WAEC should start paying teachers so that we can stop blaming them.

Koko: Teachers should be the highest paid civil servants because our lives depend on them.

Kaka: They should earn more than doc­tors?

Koko: Oh yes, because you need a doc­tor when you are sick but you need teachers whether you are well or ill. An education sys­tem that is faulty will produce faulty engineers, faulty accountants, faulty journalists, faulty politicians who will produce faulty governors and Senators and Representatives and more faulty teachers.

Kaka: All of which will produce a faulty nation and an endangered future.

Koko: That is how we ended up with all the vices ravaging us and instead of fixing our lep­rosy, we are scratching the itch.

Kaka: The job of WAEC is to examine, mark, assess students’ performances and tell us how dumb or brilliant our children are. Dumb scripts mean bad marks. Bad marks mean fail­ure. Or are markers supposed to produce an­swer scripts too?

Koko: Ask me o. We just like to do what we should not do and leave undone what we should. We like to frolic in sin and expect grace to abound.

Kaka: WAEC and its examinations every year is the mirror that reveals our swollen lips and broken nose. We need to do some­thing about the message instead of stran­gling the messenger.

Koko: In South Africa, the President or the Minister of Education does a nation­wide broadcast just before their equivalent of WASCE starts. Their Matric exams is a national issue and mass failure means the nation will want to peel off the head of the minister like an orange. We need to start see­ing this annual mass failure for what it is.

Kaka: What?

Koko: That a failed future awaits a nation whose children cannot pass West African School Certificate Examinations. And blam­ing WAEC for that is dumb, totally dumb and another failure.



Re: Her younger lover

“You can’t choose who you love, but you can decide when you have had enough” –Fun­ke Egbemode

This is an eternal truth. But it takes the Grace of God for men and women to accept the fact of this statement. That is, most people are overwhelmed by the fear and ‘shame’ of broken marriages and relationships. So, they live a lie and stay put till they pay the ulti­mate price with their life in most cases. Then you also have a large number of our mothers, sisters and daughters who have had enough but can’t decide on the quit option because of Christianity doctrine of ‘For better and for worse’ and also cultural injunction of a mar­ried woman must never return to her parents home. But happily in Islam, a woman or the man has the liberty of calling it quits if they discover irreconcilable differences at whatever stage of the relationship. When the woman is older in a relationship, she would most times want to be respected on the base of her senior­ity when they have misunderstanding and also look at her ‘junior’ husband like her junior brother. This is the crux of the matter and the genesis of bad blood. Love has nothing to do with age. Most women who experience most of this evil treatment from younger partners are the architects of their doom because they failed to know that the life of a woman is like that of the FRUIT that has its short season of ripeness and attraction. But honestly, 90% of women mistake LUST for LOVE because of their emotional nature and greed for either good sex or materialism.

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