The old Midwestern Region, later Bendel State, was the foundry for academic and sporting excellence. And when on that glorious August 27th, 1991, it was split into Delta and Edo, the Delta part left the union with the strong expressive gene of distinction in sports and academics.
But the state began to lose its lustre and majesty in both domains as the military burrowed deeper into the fabric of governance. It showed in the gradual dip in the state’s ranking on the national academic index. The primary and secondary school sporting fiestas that hallmarked activities across the old Bendel began to fade into the horizon. Grassroots sporting competitions were not only treated as serious part of an academic year, they defined the mores and norms of the youths in the days of yore.
Old school boys of St. Anthony’s College, Ubulu-Uku (my alma mater) are still steeped in the broth of nostalgia. They recall those brilliant moments when the school posted with near-arrogant consistency one of the best results in the WAEC exams. They relive the moments of great and gritty exploits of the students in football, in table tennis, in the sprints and high jumps. The school motto: Emerge Et Adefica (Latin for Arise and Build) was the student’s battle cry. It was the fillip that drove their rotor of performance. They arose, they built, they excelled.
For a school founded in 1956 by the Catholic mission, scoring straight A’s in all WAEC exams by some students was a given. From as far back as 1969, scoring the A grade in all subjects especially among science students was the norm. It was usually 100 per cent pass in the so-called almighty WAEC exam. Yes, WAEC exam was dreaded and even tagged ‘almighty’ in some schools but never so in St. Anthony’s. As it excelled in academics, so it did in sports. In 1969, it won the Midwest football trophy for secondary schools, beating Edo College at the popular Ogbe Stadium Benin City. St. Anthony’s students emerged state overall best at various times.
But the same St. Anthony’s College collapsed as the years went by. It got worse after Delta and Edo went their separate ways: the result military misrule. Not even the rebirth of democracy could spring the state’s education sector out of the rot. My old school morphed from majesty to miasma. Sporting facilities that facilitated the school’s rise to stardom varnished into the cesspit of disrepair. Buildings collapsed. Roofs caved in under the strain of the elements. Dormitories became dumpsites. And gradually but steadily what was once-upon-a-time the glory of Bendel regressed to the shame of Delta.
The bull of decay in education was in full rampage in Delta. Somebody has to tame it. Governor Ifeanyi Okowa has stepped out to beat the beast. Will he be the matador? The champion in this bullfight? Education in Delta requires a full reset. Total restoration to its default mode of excellence and untainted quality. Okowa, himself a product of Nigeria’s public school system (Edo College, Benin and University of Ibadan), must be a worried man. Of course he’s worried. And he never hid his aversion for the slide and the dip in qualitative education. He voiced his anxiety at the sad reality of too many Deltans chasing too few admission slots in tertiary schools. Exceptionally brilliant Deltans have been denied admission into universities and Unity schools across the country because their ‘quota was filled’ before they even wrote the entrance exam, or because they are not part of the ‘catchment area’ for those universities and polytechnics. How do you explain that out of 25,000 Delta residents that applied for university admission in 2020, over 20,000 qualified but only 4,000 were admitted, whereas in some states the floodgates of university admissions are opened for both the qualified and non-qualified.
He bemoaned the dearth of technical skills among the youths. The old technical colleges that produced City and Guild certified technicians in the good old days have become shadows of their old glory. But Deltans love to go to school. They are famed for always seeking knowledge. At home and offshore, Deltans have hugged the headlines for their outlier performances in education. They excel in Medicine, Law, Sciences and the Liberal Arts, and in just about all aspects of human endeavour. Deltans rule the roost in sports. And this explains the republicanism of the people. Nobody is a serf in insufferable servitude. Every Deltan, young or old, is a sophisticated, surefooted being; bold, street smart and book-wise. An educated mind is a liberated mind. Delta epitomizes that. Truth is, the average Delta kid just wants to get good education, including technical education. But quota and progressive negligence of the sector have robbed many of the opportunity. Okowa is reformatting the ecosystem. The governor is bringing back the glorious, old order.
There is a deliberate policy to ensure that all Deltans of school age are captured within the frameworks of the National Policy on Education (NPE), United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Universal Basic Education (UBE) parameters. This paradigm shift has spiked youths’ interest in technical and vocational education with enrolment spiraling by over 150 per cent since 2015. A good 12 vocational centres plus five newly approved ones make up the ensemble of skills and technical capacity builders churning out men and women specially prepared to create wealth and create jobs rather than being job hunters.
The birthing of three universities namely, the University of Delta, Agbor; Dennis Osadebay University, Anwai and the University of Science and Technology, Ozoro via laws of the State Assembly will satiate the hunger of Deltans for university education. The state potentially has nine universities – four public and five private; four polytechnics (two public and two private); seven schools of nursing/health technology; two colleges of education; 1,510 secondary schools (474 public and 1036 private). But the emphasis is not in planting schools. It’s in the infusion of technology and quality into the schools system. It’s in building the total man: mentally, physically and spiritually.
Nelson Mandela once described education as “the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” That goes without saying. Great leaders have caused liberation of their people by exposing them to the vaults of knowledge, not by giving them money, a primordial practice of tokenism. Okowa is deliberately investing in qualitative and technical education as a tool for equipping the people and preparing them for the demands of tomorrow. Those who sneer and snigger at the birthing of ‘too many’ schools should check the implosion in the number of out-of-school children in some states in Nigeria. It’s a dangerous proposition to ignore the questing for knowledge of a people. Surely, if that yearning is not satiated, they will divert their energy somewhere else usually to the path of negativity. Okowa has taken Delta back to school because he does not believe in giving Deltans fish that would last for a moment; he is teaching them how to fish just so they will be fed for a lifetime (apologies to Jewish philosopher, Moses ben Maimon, aka Maimonides).