This Bizarre Signout Culture -By Kene Obiezu

With the annual West African Examination Council (WAEC) examinations coming to an end last week, many senior secondary school students who partook in the exams descended into debauchery in the full glare of onlookers and the relentless scrutiny of social media.
The pictures are all over the internet. Wild dancing resembling orgies, school uniforms battered by markers, and loud, amorous behaviors that were as repulsive as they were reprehensible were in abundant supply.

What one sees at first glance is a generation that has lost touch with the gravity of the challenges before them, the need to take their future seriously and the overriding imperative to be circumspect, respectful, and prudent. In a country where prudence can save lives, it is especially important that the kids learn to be prudent as they cross the teenage threshold and step into adulthood in a world that is a ruthless to adults as it is to teenagers.

In a way, their refusal to reflect and fall sober at the steep challenges life in Nigeria presents is a protest in itself, an act of resistance and rebellion. It is defiance decorated with delirium even if it is disturbing enough to parents and their society.

In a country where bandits have refined the art of targeting school children, there is everything to celebrate in completing the great escape from secondary school. In a country where many school buildings lie in ruins, with chairs and lockers falling into disrepair, completing secondary school is worth celebrating. In a country where the registrar of a major examination body turns on the waterworks to distract the naïve from his incompetence and ineptitude in handling national examinations, finishing secondary school is worth celebrating.

In a country where life can be snatched from one unaccountably in a matter of seconds, it is important to celebrate little wins because no one is sure if anything as it could all end the next minute.

So, while no one can blame the students for celebrating the end of their secondary school education, their attention must be drawn to the grave dangers of exorbitant, over-the-top celebrations that mask the scale of challenges they face to pursue higher education or contribute meaningfully to their country, and call into question their training and discipline.
Education is more about character than it is about scholarship. This timeless recognition of the imperative of education to mold responsible and respectable character even before it forges the receptacle of scholarship was famously recognized by the immortal Mahatma Gandhi who described education without character as one of seven social sins.

But from whence are the students supposed to learn character? In a country where the society daily faces an egregious erosion of its ethics by odious public office holders, indiscrete religious and traditional leaders and amorous music artistes, who will bell the cat?

For children and young people in Nigeria, it is becoming increasingly harder to believe in the cause of the country, invest their hopes in the cause of the country and defend the country they call their own. At a time when all many young people want to do is leave, they must brace themselves up for the challenges of being Nigerian and living in Nigeria.

The fact that teenagers are wildly celebrating finishing secondary school even while they await results should stir conversation, reflection and crucially, circumspection.

Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com