A promising teenage student of ASACS Group of Schools in Bwari Area Council of Abuja suddenly slumped and died while participating in the school’s inter house sport rehearsals. Since his death, his family has been up in arms with the school authority over the cause of death. Assistant Editor, Seun Akioye spoke to all the sides in the tragic incident.
On March 1, 2017, at about 2pm, the mobile phone of Mirian Nnnana Ogbe, a journalist and marketing executive rang. The caller was a familiar name, Mr. Uche Cosmos, Principal, ASACS Group of Schools located in Bwari Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Cosmos has had plenty of reasons to call Mirian in the last four years, her last child and her only boy, 16-year-old Michael Paul Ogbe had been a boarding student at the school. That day, Cosmos did not wait for the usual pleasantries before asking about the health conditions of Michael.
“We are at Bwari General Hospital because Michael had an accident,” he told her. He then proceeded to ask about Michael’s medical history, which according to him, the doctors attending to Michael wanted.
“Is Michael alive?” was the first statement that rolled off the lips of Mirian, Cosmos would later recall to The Nation. “Yes he is alive,” was the assurance, which Mirian needed.
It took Mirian and her companion about 50 minutes to do the distance to the hospital, but far from the assurances given to her by Cosmos, the scene that confronted her was one that would change her life forever.
Mirian: “I got to the hospital at about 2:50 pm and met Michael already dead; they had stuffed cotton wool into his nose and tied his legs in preparation for the mortuary. The Principal and other staff members of the school were just saying to me sorry ma, sorry ma.”
Mirian was seating in a corner of her living room in the Life Camp area of the FCT; it was only a few days ago that her only son died in a yet to be ascertained circumstances in a school he had attended for four years.
Michael was a final year student of the ASACS Group of Schools. According to his family members, he was perhaps the best student in the school; a computer genius, whose skills at computer programming was almost too good to be true.
Mirian had lost her husband and Michael’s father 12 years ago and since then, she has had to shoulder the enormous responsibility of raising Michael and his siblings. But the boy’s genius seems to compensate for the days of starvation and sacrifice.
“They were paid to kill my son,” Mirian said with a ferocious expression. It was a serious allegation to make against a school but she was adamant. “There is no housemaster in that school for one week, so nobody to check on them. When he was sick, the housemaster would have called me that Michael was sick and asked him to step down on the training,” she said.
The particulars of the circumstances that led to the death of the promising computer genius have been obtained mainly from the mother, the students who were at the scene and the school officials but none of these testimonials aligned in the most salient of points.
According to Mirian, the school was preparing for the inter house sports and Michael was supposed to compete in the high jump category. On that day, he had complained of feeling sick to the school matron who asked him to go eat and come back for drugs. But Michael never went back for reason no one could tell.
Michael went to participate in the High Jump activity but according to some of the students, he muttered “God help me” before he jumped and fell down heavily far beyond the mattress the school provided as a buffer.
“Final year students were not supposed to be involved in all these inter house sports, which is why I said they were paid to kill him. On that day, he went to the school clinic to say he was sick, the nurse asked him to go and eat and then come back for the drug, but he did not go back.
“His blood group is AA and they are prone to malaria. He did not have any sickness; he did more than 30 tests in Germany, so the school needs to speak to us and tell us what happened between 10am and the 2pm they called me. I arrived at Bwari General Hospital by 2:50pm and he was already packaged for mortuary.
“Michael landed so hard on the ground and according to the principal, the mattress they used was just like the size of this dining table like 4 by 6 and Michael height is 6: 4, so he landed heavily on the ground, he tried to stand up, he collapsed and tried again and collapsed. According to the principal, they started around 9 and it happened around 11am but I know that was a lie, it happened in the morning,” Mirian said.
If the accident happened in the morning as postulated by Mirian, what then was the school doing between that time and the time he was rushed to the hospital? “They need to tell me what happened between the hours he fell down and the time he was taken to the hospital,” Mirian insisted.
Another question was if Michael was unwell and it was to the knowledge of the school nurse, why was he allowed to participate in inter-house sports rehearsal? Was the school adequately equipped to run such sports in the premises? Why was there no housemaster in the school to monitor the wellbeing of the students?
Mirian thinks she has all the answers. The school has no structure on ground to coordinate the sort of sporting activities it embarked on and her son died because the Ministry of Education, which was supposed to supervise such schools, was not monitoring the private boarding schools properly.
She said: “Ordinarily before, they allowed the parents to come into the hostels to see where the students live but two years ago, they stopped, saying it was no longer allowed. The students always complain about bad feeding but because they are final year students we allowed it to go.
“The Ministry of Education is not doing what it ought to; there is no monitoring; but there should be a standard. You must have some facilities in the boarding school, and parents have the right to know what the child is eating, where the child is living; the ministry shouldn’t just approve the school and let it run like that. There should be a system!
“The Ministry of Sports should also come and check if the school has the facilities to run a sports competition. Ask the government if they have been monitoring? The school has dilapidated structures; they should shut some schools down because they are death traps. If you don’t have the facilities, you can’t run it; you can’t play the game.”
Africa’s Steve Jobs
“That boy was the Steve Job of Africa,” Marian said, a sad smile playing at the corner of her mouth. As if to reinforce her claim, she went into the room and brought the laptop Michael used the week preceding his death.
“That boy was a genius,” she insisted. “He was into programming. He could hack into anybody’s phone and computer; he would sit down here just working normally on his computer and he already has locked your phone.”
The boy they called Slom was truly at home with computers at a very early age. He adored the late Apple founder, Steve Jobs and the first picture he drew in his life was of Mr. Jobs. He was only eight years old then. All his apparatus were from the Apple brand, Ipad, laptop and phones. His mother eventually bought him a “normal” desktop computer; but he never touched it. The computer laid by a corner of the dining area in the house.
He was said to have spent hours on the internet, soaking up the life and work of Mr. Jobs, learning about computer programming and fashioning his life after the Apple founder.
The mother switched on Michael’s computer, it was an Apple MacBook and from the background, one could see the traces of a genius. “Nobody can open his computer in this house,” she said. On the home screen, a simple sentence read: “If you are not Michael Paul, shut down now,” it was hard to know if that was a threat or just an admonition.
Michael called himself the computer god, his profile on Instagram read “Michael the Ghost Man.” None of his immediate family members could remember who taught him about computers, “He just knew it, no one taught him, it was a knowledge he brought from heaven,” a family member said.
Michael was so versed in computer world he was said to be tutor to University students and would help Master’s degree students in Computer Engineering with their work. “They used to pay him a lot. Even people from IT companies would be waiting for Michael to come back from school to help them solve their issues; so the boy used to have a lot of money,” Mirian said.
The money he made was reinvested in acquiring more gadgets and helping his family too. And he loved to play pranks by hacking into his siblings phones, diverting their calls and sometimes making prank calls to his sisters while he disabled their phones.
He was said to also be in the habit of shutting down many fake websites and no matter how secured your website is, he would find a way around it, gain access and shut it down. He was mad over the MMM Ponzi scheme and once threatened to start one just to teach Nigerians a lesson.
Michael was already processing an admission into a University in Canada; he had secured a partial admission to the Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada where he would read Computer Science.
“If Michael had gone to the university, he could have gone beyond Mark Zuckerberg,” a relative said with a strong conviction. But Michael himself had told his people he never wanted to make money, but to use his unusual knowledge and skill to educate people, come up with ideas and platforms that would solve Nigeria’s problems and prove to the world that Africa is no backwater. Ultimately, he wanted to become a cyber-security expert.
“He could hack into any website; shut down any website and he wanted to become an expert in cyber security. I am very angry. I am sad but more angry. His death was unnecessary, if we had got to know on time. It is just a shame that he had to die with his mind and his brain just like that,” another relative said.
Inside ASACS International School
The signboard announcing ASACS Group of Schools was sandwiched between about five others announcing different entities, from small businesses to a bank on the dusty and pot bole-ridden Bwari Road. The signboard itself was dirty and old and does no justice to the international appellation the school tried to portray.
The main building in the school was a storey building which appeared to have recently been re-painted. The building was in a small compound and students could be seen loitering in some of the classrooms whose windows opened to the dusty street.
Two other compound lay adjacent and opposite to the main school building, one is used for remedial classes while the other with a little more expansive compound housed on one side a rectangular building which housed the senior secondary and the staff room.
Just like the main building, these two buildings appeared to have been recently painted but in blue colour- a job which even to a novice appeared badly done. Inside the classrooms, which had two sets of windows for easy ventilation, students went about their normal studies, though about two classes appeared to have no teachers.
The hostels were behind the main building and they consist of small rooms built together. At the entrance to the hostels, two plain clothe security men sat on a stool and greeted visitors politely. A peep inside the hostel, like the whole school, did not justify the international appellation as it appeared old and ugly.
The ground where Michael met his death was in front of his class; it was the small space the students had to practice for the inter-house sports and where all the sporting activities took place. The principal, Mr. Uche Cosmos, who has been at the helms of affairs for six years, was about leaving the school when The Nation visited.
The principal disputed many of the statements made by Marian. Even though he could not recall the exact time the incident occurred, he was sure it wasn’t in the morning as claimed by the family. “I was not in the school when it happened; I left the school just before 10am and the inter-house sport practice had not commenced. They were only just preparing, so it could not have been the 10 o’ clock you mentioned,” he said.
Cosmos said the school did the best it could under the circumstances. “I was called where I was when it happened; I cannot remember the time, but I told them to rush him to the General Hospital and also went there myself. I met him; he was still alive with about five doctors around him.
“I was asked if he had any prior sickness and I said it was only the mother who could answer that. When I called the mother, the first thing she asked me was if he was still alive and I said yes because he was alive then.
“It was after that that he died. I did not take not of the time. I could not have been checking the time at that time, but the school did everything it could for him. It was an unfortunate incident and we have cancelled the inter-house sports. We have also gone to see the mother and we have told the family that wherever they want the school to come in and help, we will surely do.”
The principal also dismissed the allegation that the school does not have the facilities to hold inter-house sports. He claimed the mattress used in the high jump was the one used in the previous year which Michael also participated without incident. He said he could not see any sign of injury on the body which suggested that he did not die due to injuries sustained while in practice.
“I didn’t see any injuries on him at all, it was a selection process, there had been two jumps and we were looking for the third qualifier. It was an ongoing process. The mother said they want to conduct autopsy on the body, we are waiting to see what it will come up with,” he said.
He also seemed a little irritated about the claim that Michael was the best student in the school. “You can’t say he was the best student, he was not,” he said. But when asked about his computer skills he relaxed, “Yes, I can say he was good with computers but not the best student.”
“Bury him in Abuja; we want to visit his grave”
As the body of the teenager lay cold in the morgue, his friends at ASACS are already planning on some form of immortalisation. According to some of them who spoke on strict condition of anonymity, Michael should be buried in Abuja so the friends can attend his funeral.
But their last homage would not end at the burial; they also planned on visiting his grave frequently, so they can continue paying their respect to a friend and a genius.
“We are still on planning where to bury him, the family would decide, “Marian said. Then as if an idea just occurred to her she muttered: “They want to be visiting his grave. That is very touching, can you see that?” And for the first time in this discussion, what seemed like an emotion seemed to overpower her.
