It is a disaster of an unimaginable proportion; disaster that predated the administration of the current action governor of the Centre of Excellence. Its reality bespeaks anti-excellence. Simply anti-Lagos. Gbagada-based Ogo Oluwa Primary School, Idi Odo Primary School and Temidire Primary School are public but segregationist institutions. Founded by the Lagos State government for the purpose of grooming knowledge, equality, freedom, hope and creativity in the minds of the custodians of the future of the nation, but alas, the Idi-Odo trio is now funded to uphold its degeneration into institutions of the less-privileged, of ‘unlucky’ children permanently denied the fortune of hobnobbing with their ‘lucky’ peers.
No thanks to the ironically ‘privileged’ and ‘elitist’ Gbagada environment of the rich whose personal safety and security has led to the denigration of these public schools into exclusive centres for labourer-children – house-helps, house-maids, cooks and the likes. Nothing can be more sorrowful than the sight of ones Alma Mater that was indeed the potter of so many shining stars of today in such peril that is now the lot of the Idi-Odo trio. Schools that sprang up as Gbagada Primary School III and School IV, illuminating the dawn of the Alhaji Lateef Jakande-led administration with glowing rising sun.
Although the species of classroom blocks that surfaced across the earth of Lagos at the advent of Baba Kekere’s government, as temporary structures built within a twinkle of an eye, were indeed poultry-like in design, yet the irresistibility of the nostalgia their memories conjure in the Nigerian citizenry till date is an open statement of the superlative education that pupils of yore, including, this writer procured therein.
As pioneering students of Gbagada Primary School IV, for instance, having been relocated from some ancient schools to complete our foundational education at Idi-Odo, we found ourselves in an excitingly mixed world; a world that broke boundaries, flattened fences and walloped walls. A world of innocence which inhabitants thrived in pleasant forgetfulness of our socio-economic differences, as the line between the rich and the poor became inexistent.
Obviously, the long stretch of fence that now marks the Gbagada boundary, delineating its territories from its neighbouring Somolu-Pedro-Bariga neighbourhood was sincerely erected some few years back to ward off security threats in a nation where none sleeps with closed eyes. Good intention, no doubt. But for the surreptitious evil the edifice casts on our collective future as a nation.
What is my drift? It is a given fact that, in contemporary Nigeria, our public schools are no longer patronized by the relatively few economically-advantaged Nigerian families, found in such a luxuriant environment as Gbagada Estates – a radical departure from what used to be in the good days of yore, which has, thus, largely restricted the services of the Idi-Odo schools to the less-privileged masses on the other side of the skirting fence. I mean the sprawling and struggling mass of Nigerian families that densely populate the Somolu-Pedro-Bariga world, to whom the relatively ‘meagre’ fees charged by ‘cheap’ private schools within their vicinity is totally unaffordable.
Tragically, however, for many of such families, the hope of bequeathing, on their offspring, a future brighter than today, through education at the proximate, cost-free Idi-Odo Schools at nearby Gbagada, has been totally dashed. Dashed by the loathsome, long stretch of Gbagada ‘apartheid’ fence that today torments its discerning beholder with a fatal fear of tomorrow.
My writing pen pairs with my eyes in shedding tears of sorrow. Tears of regrets, tears of lamentations, tears of nostalgia, as I behold my Alma Mater in its current status as a school now ‘majorly meant’ for housemaids and all other categories of child-slaves wickedly engaged by Gbagada residents whose elitist hands actually held the pen that outlawed child-labour in our revered constitution.
Indeed, no law forbids anyone from enrolling his children in these schools. But, this bad ‘apartheid’ fence does just this. It imposes on kids from the other side of it, a daily merry-go-rounding ritual of a minimum of 20km trek, on daily school trips. Hence, schools that once infected every speeding motorist on the Oshodi-Gbagada Expressway with exuding liveliness is now a ghost of its old self, now hardly conspicuous, probably due to our collective violent neglect and indifference towards the sort of children whose names now fill the registers of those ‘unlucky’ teachers.
Yes! “Less privileged’ teachers teaching ‘less privileged’ pupils would struggle to deceive you with cheerful mien to welcome every approaching adult in the faint hope that, at last, protracted prayers are about fruiting. They are always looking into the empty space with forlorn eyes imagining oncoming parents holding their kids for enrolment.
If anything is sure, the restless Ambode with his cabinet lieutenants would agree with me that the deployment of such an artificial barrier as a fence to isolate and foreclose extensive and mixed patronage by citizens and residents of the state can never be rationally justified. Or, what can rationalize a situation that has forced those institutions funded with public resources, constitutionally meant to engender sense of equality and belonging in the citizenry, to degenerate into ‘second’ class schools for ‘second’ class students handled by ‘second’ class teachers.
The likely effects of such a strange educational setting are better imagined. To call a spade a spade, it can only beget tragedy on the victim, not victims.
No! The victimized are not the multitude of Nigerian children who, over the years, are denied of access to the potter services these schools were originally founded to offer. They are neither the second class outputs with jaundiced psychology that are likely to emerge from there.
The victim is none but our society, our supposed community of humans whose inborn mentality of freedom, equality and potentialities is expected to derive monumental boosting through the facility of education. To relegate and ignore this truism is to refuse to learn from history and admit the weighty role of negative citizenship orientation in the multi-coloured reality of terror in our nation of today.
Hurray! When I behold the ongoing magical structural intervention of the Lagos government in Lady Lak Primary School, Bariga, an innate voice within me tells me there is hope for the Idi-Odo schools and their likes. My elation over the current rebuilding of Lady Lak, an aged facility is particularly due to the fact that my educational sojourn actually started, over four decades ago, in the same set of buildings, then dilapidated, that are just being replaced with ultra modern ones by the Ambode administration.
Still, the fear of history threatens my hope with hopelessness in terms of what may become of these schools even after the governor’s anticipated positive response.
Whether those invisible and seemingly ‘invincible’ forces that frustrated the order and efforts of ex-Governor Fashola on the aborted reconstruction of the fragile wooden make-shift bridge linking the Gbagada and Bariga community would allow the public interest to reign supreme, this time around, remains a begging question.
Lest we forget, Fashola’s order and subsequent mobilization of materials to the impassable bridge site was in response to the yearnings of the staff and students of Gbagada Comprehensive High School for safe and quick access to a public health clinic situated within nearby but ‘far’ Bariga-based Mafoluku Market. What has become of those abandoned tons of sand, granite stones as well as machines, for almost a decade, is currently visible to the blind.
- Olokode, a media consultant, writes in vide solacemediaconsult@gmail.com
