•Mrs. Ijeoma Ogbonnaya Photo: Sun News Publishing

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An educationist, Mrs. Ijeoma Ogbonnaya, who is very "old school" about restoring the integrity of examination halls, says that she is not bothered about the deep connections and entrenched system that support the N20 billion racket which examination fraud has become.

With near evangelistic zeal, she has commenced a campaign to encourage students desire "the sincere milk of academic excellence."

In an age when people prefer the easy way out and are willing to spend money to get what they want, she believes very strongly that all hope is not lost despite the daunting realities.

"In those old days, a teacher could discipline a child and the parents would literarily come to the school to apologize for their ward’s bad behaviour. But these days, if a teacher does as much as scold a student, probably for not tucking his shirt in, the teacher would be sure to get a long protest letter from the student’s parents. Even the school owner would publicly scold the "audacious" teacher and then go on to make a long GSM call to the offended parent, copiously apologizing for the error," she sadly observes.

Looking at the present environment in which teachers operate, Ogbonnaya says that teachers no longer feel inclined to teach in the classrooms because school proprietors absolutely expect them to practically write the exam papers for their students in the hall.

How did teachers come to this pass? Without mentioning the school where a particular incident happened, and drove her to take early retirement from classroom teaching, Ogbonnaya explains: "Because of the kind of person I am, I believe that when the child gets to school, he should sit down and study. I don’t believe in helping children when it comes to examination. If I want to teach the child, I do so in the class.

After teaching in the class, I don’t teach in the hall. I won’t even get close to that place. There were certain things happening in the school, which I didn’t like, and could not cope with. Actually, that is one of the things that I am out to fight, and to educate children about. The thing is examination malpractice. Not teaching the children in the class but doing so in the examination hall. I saw certain things that I could not take. These things are destroying the educational system.

"Having been in the school system, there are some schools that practice what is against educational norms, like examination malpractice; a system where teachers have lost their identities as teachers; where they do not teach any longer in the classrooms; where they give children shallow knowledge in all the subjects.

And they now go into the examination hall not only teaching them, but actually writing for them. What I met on ground was a situation where the examination hall no longer looked like an examination hall. A situation where students would gather around a table as if they were having tutorial and the teacher would hold a textbook in his hand and be dictating answers to the questions for the students to write in their scripts. This was happening right in the examination hall for NECO, WAEC, and GCE. Meanwhile, the supervisor would have been "settled" and he would be outside the hall while all these things would be going on in private schools.

It was too much for me, that I could no longer hold it. And with my Christian background also, I said there was no way I could accept salary got from a system like this, when I know that such a thing was going on. I was convinced that if there would be increment in salary, the money must have been raised from this fraudulent practice. It was a system where both the owners of the schools and the teachers were corrupt. The owners would ginger the teachers to do that. The teachers, therefore, don’t see the need of teaching the students in the classrooms any longer.

So, their role was just to answer the questions in the examination hall. In the long run, the students are not educated, whether morally or academically. I felt that it was time for me to leave the system as a teacher. Hardly would you be a teacher in a private school and not be expected to participate in examination fraud.

In fact, in one case, I was confronted by the principal. She said, your students are writing the English examination and you are not with them. Don’t you think that you should go and see what they are doing? I said I have taught in the classroom. I won’t teach in the exam hall. She retorted: Do you think that your own christianity is more than my own? After this encounter, her countenance changed towards me. At this point, I knew that I could no longer remain in the school. I decided that I must go back to the basics to restore integrity to the examination hall. In fact, that is out vision. We are taking education back to the basics – where the mind would be educated and the children will come out fully trained (morally, academically, socially and otherwise)."

Married to a man from Amasiri, Ebonyi State, Ogbonnaya hails from Enugwu-Ukwu Anambra State. A product of very ‘old schools’ with solid reputation in the Southeast, she had her primary and secondary school education in Uli, where she attended Uli Girls, with a brief stay at Abbot Girls.

Recalling her early days, she says: "I was born a teacher: my father was teacher at Uli Girls. At the time my mother was teaching at Umuakom Primary school, Uli. So, we have been moving on that education line. After that, I immediately went to Federal College of Education (FCE), Yola for my NCE. We did this when education was very tough. For you to get into the FCE then, you had to take the central entrance examination, which was very competitive. If you passed, you would be posted to anywhere. For a young person born in 1967, I was about 17 years old when I went to Yola. I studied English and religious studies.

I enjoyed schooling in the North though it was not very easy because the weather was very harsh. After getting the NCE, I moved on to Ahmadu Bello University where I studied language arts and graduated in 1989. I was posted to Rivers State College of Education (St John’s Campus) for the National Youth Service scheme. I started there as an assistant lecturer. When finished the national service I was retained. I was still very young, 22 years old. I lived alone. As a single lady, it was not really easy coping with the male attention.

"By then I was not a born-again Christian. But God and the kind of upbringing I got helped me greatly. After spending a year working as an assistant lecturer, my father insisted that I must leave Port Harcourt because of the kind of life associated with the city. I had to leave the Rivers State College of Education after sometime and moved to Lagos. It was not easy to get a job at the tertiary level, so I went back to a secondary school to teach. This was a sort of a come-down for me."

To be able to cope with the move from being a lecturer, who dealt with mature students to teach a class of noisy kids, Ogbonnaya said the only reasonable thing to do was to "bring myself down to their level. Then I was still very young, so I didn’t find it difficult. I went to Loral International Secondary School, Igbesa, where I taught English. After one year I was made the head of Department (Foreign Languages). I had other teachers working under me although I was the youngest.

"The age difference was much. It was really tough but I had to stand my ground. I know I am a principled person and I am disciplined. Having gone through the rigours of education from NCE to degree, born a teacher and having been in the system. All the while we lived in the school compound, I had already grown up as a teacher. So, I was able to cope with the teachers. I was bent on doing what was right, and of course what is still right up till now.

Actually, they tried to see whether I could bend. But I didn’t bend. I am not the kind of person that will compromise. Morally and academically, I don’t compromise because I believe in what is right. It doesn’t matter what it costs me. While I was there, I was made the secretary of the Parent-Teacher Association for six years. And also the secretary of the Disciplinary Committee for six years. I worked in these capacities until it was time for me to leave. I left in 2001."

The campaign, which Ogbonnaya has embarked on, is focused on motivating teachers to uphold professional integrity. Equally, school counsellors, owners of the schools and parents are at the core of the change programme.

"The problem we have in the school system is an all-round problem. It is only the child that is involved ignorantly," she notes, stressing that only the holistic approach would make any impact. The campaign took off in 2005, when she held her first seminar for counsellors and school principals.