It is a disaster of an unimaginable proportion. Disaster that predated the administration of the current Governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode. 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 original 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, cooks and the likes. Nothing can be more sorrowing than the sight of one’s 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 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, 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 non-existent.
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 patronised by the relatively few economically advantaged Nigerian families, found in such a luxuriant environment as Gbagada Estate, 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 are totally unaffordable.
Tragically, however, for many of such families, the hope of bequeathing to their offspring a future brighter than today, through education at the cost-free Idi-Odo schools at the 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.
Indeed, no law forbids anyone from enrolling their 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 a cheerful mien to welcome every approaching adult in the faint hope that, at last, protracted prayers are about bearing fruit. They are always looking into the empty space with forlorn eyes imagining oncoming parents holding their kids for enrolment.
Poor teachers. They know too well their own lot is dissimilar to the lots. Hence, their tactics must be radically different from the conventional – extremely indulging, persuasive and pampering. They can’t but indulge their very few pupils in erratic tendencies; persuade them from staying away for months; and even pamper the few who ‘favour” them by showing up again, after some long self-imposed holidays.
If anything is sure, the restless Ambode with his cabinet will agree with me that the deployment of such an artificial barrier as a fence to isolate and foreclose extensive and mixed patronage by residents of the state can never be rationally justified. Or, what can rationalise a situation that has forced those institutions funded with public resources, constitutionally meant to engender a 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 by its name, it can only beget tragedy on the victim, not victims.
No! The victimised are not the 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 are 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.
When I behold the ongoing structural intervention of the Lagos State Government in LadiLak 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 LadiLak, 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 Mr. Governor’s anticipated positive response.
Whether those invisible and seemingly “invincible” forces that frustrated the order and efforts of ex-Governor Babatunde Fashola on the aborted reconstruction of the fragile wooden makeshift bridge linking the Gbagada and Bariga communities would allow the public interest to reign supreme, this time round, remains a begging question.
Lest we forget, Fashola’s order and subsequent mobilisation of materials to the impassable bridge site were 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 even to the visually impaired.
Olokode, a public affairs analyst based in Lagos, wrote in via solacemediaconsult@gmail.com
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