SIR: As a concerned parent and retired teacher, I have decided to join the ongoing debate on the propriety or otherwise of the SUMMARY passage for SS1 in Ogun State Unified Examinations for Public Schools, as reported in the papers. I had initially commented on the controversy, but have now obtained further information on the exam saga from a couple of Ogun workers.
Fortunately, I was able to obtain a copy of the third term question paper from an SS1 student in my neighbourhood. The controversial passage in Section C was said to have been “Culled from Jola Adegbenro’s Issues on Education Today”. The examiner’s/ teacher’s name is Joel Adegbenro.
To my astonishment, I tried in vain to establish the Jola Adegbenro on any online platform. Neither could I establish the original write-up from where the exam question was said to have been extracted. According to some civil servants, when confronted on the source of the passage by the panel set up by the Civil Service Commission, the examiner/ teacher allegedly said he extracted the passage from his manuscript yet to be published in Issues on Education Today. And look at the additional prank played by the teacher concerning his name – Joel Adegbenro and Jola Adegbenro!
Should we now be talking about fraud, forgery, impersonation or all of the above here? Should he have been handed over to the police on this score? I leave that to the lawyers.
But the greatest tragedy in the question paper has not been highlighted by many commentators. I discovered to my horror and chagrin that the so-called SUMMARY passage was actually a summary or synopsis of opinions expressed in newspaper adverts sponsored by the opposition in the months leading to the April 11 governorship election in Ogun State. This is horrendous.
Another anomaly is that we do not set such a patently political question to students in such a formal examination. WAEC, JAMB, it’s not done! At best, you have a generalised extract on the state of education in which no particular government or administration can be held accountable. I challenge any examiner to prove the contrary. The reason is simple. No examiner or teacher must be seen to turn his pupils against a particular government in power.
The teacher/examiner and the students in this particular case know which government was supposedly being accused by the SS1 question despite the ‘smartness’ of not mentioning “Ogun” in the passage. But further mischief could be gleaned from the question paper. For instance, contrary to the passage, enrolment figures, as we all know, sky-rocketed from early 2012 as a result of free education and free textbooks of the Amosun government. There were many budding private schools across the state that closed down or nearly collapsed because so many parents withdrew their children from these schools when they heard the current administration was giving free textbooks to pupils. You may call it opportunism but why would any parent suffer to buy one or two textbooks when they can get 8 or 12 for their children free of charge?
I saw the model school at Ogijo recently and wondered if it was a private or public school. Yes, a public school. I cannot fault Amosun on this score because rather than spend my hard-earned money on renovating a great-grandfather’s mud house that would still collapse at the slightest anger of the elements, all in the name of “renovating existing infrastructure”, I will build a modern monument in honour of his memory!
So, one could see the entire passage was a product of deliberate mischief and did not reflect, in the main, the current realities or continuous efforts being made to reposition the sector by the government. It is dangerous to use students’ question paper as a platform to attack a well-meaning government on behalf of a frustrated political opposition in Ogun.
There is no way those involved in such a back-door political agitation could have escaped justice going by the provisions of Public Service Rules, as reported in the papers.
Nevertheless, I plead for clemency. Reabsorbing the officials will not be a bad idea. I know it will be a difficult choice because people should live by the consequences of their actions as a form of deterrent. But it should be possible to forgive them. At least they’ve learnt their lessons – hopefully. You cannot be politicians in civil service garbs!
Finally, workers must be wary of being used by bad-belle, ‘NFA’ politicians in the discharge of their duties. Condensing into an exam passage published attacks of the opposition political party against the government is totally reprehensible. Children are too impressionable to be drawn into such high-wire politics. We should not toy with their future.
Sabo, Sagamu, Ogun State
