Chinagorom Nwafor
I have long maintained that a disquieting number of UTME candidates no longer submit themselves to disciplined study. This conviction was reaffirmed by an experience I had in Enugu while accompanying a friend who was sitting for the examination.
We gathered at the centre, awaiting our summons into the hall, though JAMB’s protracted formalities delayed the commencement. Because I was holding my friend’s bag, several candidates presumed I, too, was an examinee. Soon, we fell into conversation about preparation. We were roughly ten in number, and I was chilled to the marrow when five confessed that, although they had taken the examination three times, they had never once sought guidance from anyone. Nor had they read The Lekki Headmaster, the prescribed text. Their complaint was unanimous: the book was insufferably tedious—the very same volume I had completed within an hour.
Two young men further admitted that they had undertaken no study whatsoever; they were present solely because compulsion required it.
As we conversed, a young woman emerged from the seven o’clock batch. When we asked how the paper had gone, she replied that she had known scarcely five answers; since the examination was objective, she had merely selected whichever options appealed to her. We laughed, and I asked, with ironic levity, why she carried no pencil, as science candidates did for calculations. With unvarnished candour, she answered that a pencil would have been immaterial, for she had no conception of what to calculate.
Her words summoned, with disquieting clarity, memories of how my friend Silas and I once prepared for JAMB. We devoted days to studying with sleep reduced to a grudging interlude. I recall with vivid precision the final examination that ultimately secured our admission to university, after successive rejections by institutions of our choosing—not because we fell short of the cut-off marks, but because, in Nigeria, advancement is too often arbitrated by “long leg.”
On that decisive day, we were at Ishieke Izzi High School, though our examination venue was CSMT. At five o’clock in the evening, we settled into a classroom, resolved to revise until daybreak. Unbeknownst to us, security personnel had announced that no one should be seen outdoors after ten o’clock. So engrossed were we in our revision that their intrusion took us unawares. They entered, confiscated our books, and ordered us outside. We sat on the bare earth as though arraigned for some grave offence.
Their search yielded nothing more incriminating than pens, jotters, past questions, and textbooks. Resistance was inconceivable; they were armed and numerous. After administering a flogging, they forced us into the boot of a vehicle. Confined within, I warned Silas that further beatings were likely; he remained unconvinced.
They demanded our place of residence and the identity of our hostel president. We complied and were instructed to call him. Unfortunately, our phones had been left at the lodge. Under escort, we retrieved one and attempted the call, but could not reach him. Thereupon, they seized our phones, beat us again, and demanded twenty thousand naira each for their release. Though we were aware of our rights, asserting them before armed men—whose numerical superiority made protest perilous—was not a viable option.
They threatened to hand the devices over to the police. Our pleas proved futile, and we left without them. Later, when the hostel president—our senior—returned, he contacted them but could not secure their release that night.
The following morning, we approached them with five thousand naira and pleaded our case. Unmoved, they insisted on forty thousand. I informed their leader that I would proceed to the nearest police station to make a formal report. They dismissed it as empty bravado—until we turned to leave. At that point, my friend suggested calling my father. I knew his number by heart.
I called my father and a senior advocate—a former commissioner in Ebonyi State, whom I regard as a father. At my father’s instruction, we handed the phone to the security officer. After their exchange, my father warned of serious consequences upon his arrival. Still, they remained defiant—until I contacted the lawyer.
He immediately directed us to the police station and assured us he would meet us there. Their insolence evaporated at once. They returned our phones, imposed a token fine, and inflicted no further punishment. The lawyer later ensured their dismissal. One of them had earlier boasted that he would turn his gun on me for my insistence. I did not flinch, even when he threatened to make Ishieke uninhabitable for me—unaware that I did not reside there.
Ironically, one of the security men admitted that he himself had sat for JAMB multiple times without success. The admission was almost absurd.
Such was the ordeal we endured in pursuit of academic success. Yet today, many students altogether forgo reading. It is therefore unsurprising that reports suggest that of two thousand candidates who sat the examination on a recent Thursday, only eighteen percent scored above two hundred.
In place of study, TikTok and other social media platforms have become a refuge, where discipline is traded for distraction.
And yet, one truth remains constant: enduring success belongs to those who accept the rigour of preparation. Everything worthwhile comes at the end—but only to those who have the fortitude to begin well, and the discipline to persist.
