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By Ambassador Lilian Onoh
Dear Minister, whenever you finally arrive at your desk in the Ministry of Education, de’eje.
Your predecessor mandated that all must start learning in vernacular so it seemed fitting to welcome you in ‘Engli-Igbo’, being the most widely spoken language where I come from. Unless you reverse that policy, you must become proficient in Igbo, Efik, Idoma and the hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects in Nigeria.
But while our children are being confused in whatever language and dialect suits their teachers, a more urgent issue needs to be addressed – namely the odious policy of IQ SUBSIDY for Northern states in the form of different entry point requirements for Federal Government Colleges (Unity Schools) across the country. It is a disastrous perversion of the Federal Character Policy and it’s nothing more than ‘legalised cheating’ that harms both the beneficiaries and those deprived by it.
Who has ever heard of MINUS points in an Exam where the starting point is ZERO? Yet Male candidates from Kebbi, Taraba, Yobe and Zamfara states are only required to score between MINUS 2 to MINUS 4 points and females required to have between +2 to +27 points! So, it is accepted that the females in these states are clearly more intelligent than their men.
Candidates from Anambra State on the other hand (whether male or female) are required to score a minimum of 139 points, followed by Imo (138), Enugu(134), Lagos(133), Abia(131), Delta(131) and Ogun (131). So, four out of the five Eastern states, two out of the six Western states and Delta from the Mid-West/Eastern/South-South region make up the states with the highest requirements for students who are from these states, no matter where they are educated.
So, a male Zamfara student in Lagos, who scores only 2 points will get admission to the Federal Government College in Lagos, whilst a Lagosian with 130 points will be denied admission! If the Zamfara student even hands in a blank answer sheet and gets ZERO, he will still get admission because he can even go below that with his IQ Subsidy of MINUS 4 given by the Ministry of Education and still get admission.
So, I have one question for the incoming Minister – Do the parents of those in the four Eastern States, the two Western States and Delta State pay less tax than those who defy mathematics by getting Negative marks from a Zero starting point?
I ask this simple question because President Tinubu removed fuel subsidy as soon as he took office. Before then, the whole country received subsidised fuel and now the whole country is paying for unsubsidised fuel. We are all roughly in the same boat.
But this odious IQ Subsidy only “benefits” a particular segment of the country and even discriminates against female students in those states. However, Federal Government Colleges are funded by the Federal Government and the taxes used are from the whole country. Ninety per cent of the resources that fund the Federal Government come from Southern Nigeria, including the Eastern oil producing states of Abia, Anambra and Imo and Delta State, yet children from these states are deprived of the benefit from their own resources from the age of 10 or 11 under a Nigerian version of Apartheid that continues till death, affecting employment, promotion, discipline, deployment, criminal liability and propensity to face criminal charges – see the fate of the in Lagos vis-à-vis lack of sanction for the vile utterances of others from the IQ Subsidy Region.
The recent JAMB saga which involved an Anambra Student falsifying her results was a clarion call for Nigeria to wake up, but instead it led to hypocritical mass hysteria from the greatest offenders that brought Nigeria to this sorry pass.
The shock was the brazenness of the student in demanding her “rights” and trying to take the reward due to the winning student with her falsified results with the brazen entitlement of all cheaters. But she is just a 19-year-old version of those we have in all echelons of government – The Executive, Legislature, Judiciary, Law Enforcement, Civil Service.
Biko, my fellow Nigerians, by definition, is the legalisation of IQ subsidy or simply cheating, using abracadabra entry marks for different parts of Nigeria not to mention requiring female students to score more than male students in Boko Haram territory, not a more egregious crime than Mmesoma’s own?
By Federal Government fiat, students from one part of the country are deprived of a level playing field in education from the age of 10 or 11.
Even without JAMB banning her for the next three years, Mmesoma would likely have watched others with 140 points from the IQ Subsidy States get university placement with full state scholarship while she languished at home with 249 points for the next three years because she is from Anambra State.
If by the age of 10 or 11 a child is unable to read, understand and do the multiple choice questions given for exams into Federal Government colleges, it is obvious that that child should not be sent to secondary school where they are given automatic promotion until they graduate with brains no better than scrambled eggs and still demand their “rights.”
The outcome of such nonsense is the stark difference in the levels of intelligence applied to the JAMB saga by one Atung Gerald from Kaduna and Mmesoma from Anambra. Kaduna is an IQ Subsidy State. Atung did not even bother to register for JAMB. He did not sit for any exam. He didn’t check the maximum obtainable score. He just printed himself a JAMB certificate with the non-existent highest score of 380 – 18 points more than the JAMB maximum of 362! He must have been getting his documents ready for the next elections!
Nigerians didn’t even raise any raucous about this caricature because it is already accepted that he must be stupid. Atung did not have a hearing at the National Assembly but Mmesoma did. Impunity for one, sanctions for the other.
So, Dear incoming Minister, do like your ‘Oga at the top’. Let the first thing you do be to remove this ridiculous IQ Subsidy so that we don’t produce graduates that boast that the invention of a Kilishi-making machine was a landmark technological achievement – in 2020!
Nigerians genuinely want to excel and want the rigorous academic criteria that will catapult Nigeria to develop its own version of Space-X instead of remaining a Kilishi-making machine Banana Republic!
In closing, a startling American education policy caught my attention. There, the grades of eight-year olds in school tests are used to determine the number of prison spaces that will be needed 10 years hence. It has been established that their academic performance at that age will impact everything in their future, including the penchant to fall into crime.
In Nigeria, these non-performers do not go to prison. Many are to be found at the highest echelons of government, brazenly demanding their rights more vociferously than Mmesoma.
So, Dear incoming Minister, follow JAMB’s example and provide a level playing field for all. Save Nigeria by removing the IQ Subsidy and the vernacular policy. Nigeria is not a separate planet. And on this planet, these two policies will send us back two thousand years.
