A few years ago, I visited my old secondary school, more than 40 years after I left. I had looked forward to the visit with the excitement of someone returning to his first true and nurturing love—except that this particular love was a school, and thankfully, it did not ask me to explain where I had been all these years.
As I travelled there, memories came flooding back. I could still remember 1976, when my mother took me to the school for the first time. In the weeks before my resumption as a boarding student, she carefully prepared me for my new adventure.
She bought me a portmanteau, made two sets each of my school and house uniforms, bought me a pair of Cortina shoes, bathroom slippers, comb, toothbrush, recommended books, ruler, pencils, Bic biros, mathematical set, exercise books, toothpaste, hair cream and body cream. Then came the provisions: garri, cabin biscuits, kulikuli (local peanut cookies), margarine, Geisha, sardines, bread, Nido, St. Louis sugar and other treasures.
I was excited about going to secondary school. Not necessarily because I was eager to study. I was particularly excited because, for the first time in my life, I would have some control over my own provisions!
My mother told me she had paid N30 for my boarding fees for the session. Today, N30 may not buy you a satchet of water in some places in Nigeria. But at the time, it bought a child’s entry into a world that would shape his entire life.
When we entered the school compound, I was almost overwhelmed. There were beautiful flower beds, shrubs, and trees everywhere. The school was neatly painted. The football field was well maintained. Everything looked orderly and cared for
To a young boy arriving at boarding school for the first time, it looked like paradise.
Then my mother did what many African mothers would do. She handed me over to her cousin, DF, who was then repeating Form 4, with the instruction:
“Toju aburo e o. Iya o gbodo je o.”
In other words: “Take care of your younger brother. He nust not suffer.”
DF responded confidently:
“No problem, ma.”
I later discovered that students were not permitted to speak vernacular in school. Our local languages were officially referred to as “vernacular,” and speaking them could attract punishment.
DF became my guardian angel. He was known as a tough guy, so nobody dared bully me. He would regularly remind me:
“If anybody gives you trouble, tell me.”
My older sister was also in the school, a few years ahead of me. So, occasionally, I would hear
“Don’t touch him. He is T’s brother.”
Two of my sister’s classmates also took me under their wings. I became their “school boy.” They protected and guided me. In return, I helped wash and iron their clothes at weekends. They were especially caring when I fell from my double-bunk bed.
It was a fairly good arrangement—although they are both dead now, I remember their kindness always.
But not every senior was impressed by my protection. Some seniors would wait for an opportunity to send me on errands or punish me for the smallest offence.
That was boarding school.
It was, in many ways, a miniature version of society.
And Then There Was the Food!
Our dining experience was something else.
We had three square meals every day, and the portions were generous. Breakfast could be pap and akara, bread with fish sauce and tea, or yam and fried eggs, accompanied by what seemed like unlimited tea.
Lunch or dinner could be rice and stew with fried fish, eba and vegetable soup, amala and ewedu, beans and yam, or garri.
And there was usually extra food.
The Food Prefect sometimes decided who got the extra portions—especially the prized fried fish heads. And, interestingly, the fish heads often found their way to junior students.
There was something beautiful about that dining hall. There was organization, orderliness, discipline and, for the most part, genuine concern for one another. Many students learned how to use cutleries properly at the school.
Of course, if you were a prefect—or had a close relationship with one—you suddenly discovered that the school had a special “economic policy” for you. Extra food had a way of locating you.
Outside the dining hall, however, another lesson in economics was taking place.
This was where the difference between the rich and the poor became obvious.
Children of wealthy parents came to school with provisions that could probably feed a small village. The less privileged came with their dependable economic reserve: garri, kulikuli, and sugar.
The wealthy children had biscuits, sardines, chocolates, drinks and all sorts of goodies. Some would finish their provisions within weeks and simply contact their parents for replenishment.
The rest of us had to learn survival.
We learnt networking. We learnt friendship. We learnt negotiation. We learnt budgeting. We learnt generosity. We also learnt that some people could identify your provisions from three classrooms away.
And, unfortunately, some learnt how to take advantage of the vulnerable—particularly the “ajebotas,” who were sometimes too generous for their own good
Boarding school was therefore not just teaching Mathematics, English and Biology.
It was teaching life.
A School That Was Built to Educate
The physical environment was, in my recollection, excellent.
Electricity was mostly steady. The public water taps worked.There were functioning science laboratories. The typing pool had functioning typewriters. Buildings were maintained. Teachers had accommodation within the school premises. There were hostel masters and mistresses. There were sporting facilities and equipment.
The teachers were knowledgeable and, importantly, many were committed.
The school bus was properly maintained and used for legitimate academic and extracurricular activities—sporting events, debates, excursions and educational trips.
I remember excursions to places such as the Bacita Sugar Company, Kainji Dam, Yankari Game Reserve and Jebba Paper Mills.
We travelled for days.
And nobody was asking whether there would be security escorts, armoured vehicles or ten police officers travelling ahead of us.
We simply went.
The environment itself was part of the education.
Flowers were deliberately planted. Shrubs were maintained. Trees were cared for. Staff watered the plants, trimmed the lawns and kept the compound beautiful.
There were cleaners.
They cleaned.
Imagine that!
The toilets were maintained. The classrooms were kept reasonably clean. The compound was cared for.
The lesson was simple: education does not happen only inside the classroom. The environment in which you educate a child also teaches that child what society values.
The School Was a Small Nigeria
Our school brought together all kinds of people, with diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, from different parts of Nigeria.
The strong and the weak.
The brilliant and the struggling.
The honest and the dishonest.
The religious and the carefree.
The disciplined and the troublesome.
The kind and the wicked.
The born-agains and the party animals.
There were students whose nicknames alone could make a junior student reconsider his entire life.
Someone could be called “Iku” — Death.
Imagine hearing:
“Iku is looking for you.”
As a junior, you didn’t need further explanation. Your legs would automatically develop an emergency exit strategy.
But somehow, we functioned together.
There were rules. There were consequences. There was discipline.
Not everything was perfect, of course. There were bullies. There were victims. There were unfair punishments. There were fights. There were students who stole. There were students who helped others. There were students who got into trouble and others who pulled them out.
In many ways, the school was Nigeria in miniature.
And somehow, many of us learnt how to navigate that little Nigeria before entering the bigger one.
The Friendships We Never Forgot
How can I forget the people who became my friends?
How could I forget the person who taught me how to “toast” a girl?
Or the one who encouraged me after my romantic advances were rejected:
“Try again. Write another letter.”
And those love letters? That is another story entirely.
Some teenage romances ended in marriage, and in some cases, heartbreak.
Others ended in unwanted pregnancies—and, sadly, some dreams were cut short.
How can I forget the friend who encouraged me to take Additional Mathematics simply because the girl I liked was a science genius?
I eventually discovered that the girl might have been worth pursuing, but F9 in Additional Mathematics was also pursuing me aggressively.
I had to make a strategic withdrawal.
There were friends who pulled us back into the Fellowship of Christian Students or the Muslim Students Association whenever we were about to go astray.
There were also friends who taught us how to sneak out of school to watch our favourite Chinese and Indian movies.
There were the brilliant ones.
The struggling ones.
The talented ones.
The party organizers.
The troublemakers.
The ones who always had provisions.
The ones who always needed provisions.
The ones who would give you food when you were hungry.
And the ones who would mysteriously help themselves to your provisions when you were not looking.
There were seniors who made life difficult.
There were bullies.
There were students who were bullied.
There were those who taught us how to use a boiling ring to heat water—or even make eba with cold water when there was no other option.
There were fights over girls and boys.
There were students notorious for speaking vernacular.
I remember the day one of our classmates had to jump through a classroom window because a senior was after him for allegedly snatching his girlfriend.
Today, we would probably call it a “relationship dispute.”
At the time, it was simply run for your life!
I remember my Indian Mathematics teacher whose pronunciation was so difficult for me to understand that Mathematics and I almost ended our relationship.
And then there was the Civics teacher who sometimes used Yoruba to explain difficult concepts. Somehow, that made everything clearer and we became more patriotic to our dear nation. We learnt Nigeria’s history too. This enriched our emotional commitment to our dear nation.
These memories remain.
And I pray that dementia never comes to steal them from us.
Then I Returned
More than 40 years later, I returned to the school.
I was excited.
But what I saw broke my heart.
The flowers were gone.
Many of the buildings were gone.
Those still standing were badly dilapidated.
Some had no roofs.
Some had no doors or windows.
The boarding facilities I remembered had disappeared.
Part of the school land had been allocated to another institution.
Other portions appeared to have been taken over and built upon by private individuals.
The small library looked almost frozen in time. The paint on the building seemed to have survived the decades better than the educational system itself.
Goats now moved around the compound with the confidence of permanent residents.
The once-impressive science laboratories were gone or reduced to shadows of what they used to be.
The school that once looked like a place preparing young Nigerians for the future now looked as though it had been abandoned somewhere between the Stone Age and the Industrial Revolution.
I stood there and asked myself:
What happened?
What happened to maintenance culture?
What happened to the government’s responsibility?
What happened to the local government?
What happened to the state government?
What happened to the traditional and community leadership?
What happened to the indigenes?
What happened to the old students?
What happened to all of us?
A School Does Not Die Overnight
A school does not become dilapidated in one day.
A flower bed does not disappear overnight.
A roof does not collapse because of one rainy season.
A laboratory does not become useless in a week.
A school dies gradually—when maintenance is ignored, when responsibility is transferred, when everybody assumes that somebody else will take care of it.
And that is the danger.
We have become very good at building new things and very poor at maintaining old ones.
We commission buildings with fanfare and abandon them to weeds.
We buy vehicles for officials while classrooms have no windows.
We spend money on ceremonies while laboratories have no equipment.
We fight over who should receive political credit while children sit in environments that communicate one powerful message:
“Nobody really cares about you.”
And that is perhaps the most dangerous lesson we can teach a child.
Where Are the Adults?
This is not simply a government problem.
Yes, governments at the federal, state and local levels have responsibilities.
Education is too important to be left to political speeches and campaign promises.
Federal and State governments must invest in schools.
Local governments and relevant education authorities must maintain what exists.
But governments are not the only ones responsible.
Where are the town’s leaders?
Where are the traditional institutions?
Where are the wealthy sons and daughters of the town?
Where are the successful professionals?
Where are the politicians who once attended the school?
Where are the old students?
Where are the community associations?
Where are those who now live abroad?
Where are the parents whose children are currently attending the school?
And where are we, the old students, who benefited from that institution?
An old school should not become an archaeological site simply because its former students became successful.
If a school helped produce doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, professors, businesspeople, politicians and professionals, bricklayers, plumbers, bankers, traders, then surely those former students can collectively do something to preserve it.
Not everything must be left to government.
Sometimes, the question should not be:
“What is government doing?”
It should also be:
“What are we doing?”
And Government Must Also Answer Some Questions
At the same time, communities must not allow government to escape responsibility.
Public schools are public assets.
Government must account for school lands.
If school property has been illegally allocated, grabbed or converted to private use, there should be questions, investigations and, where appropriate, recovery.
If public funds are allocated for education, citizens have every right to ask where the money went.
If a local government can find money for convoys, political entertainment and unnecessary expenditure, surely it can find money to repair a classroom.
If a state government can spend millions on ceremonies, publicity and vehicles, surely it can equip a science laboratory.
And if a political leader can justify an expensive SUV, perhaps we should ask how many classrooms that SUV could have repaired.
I am not suggesting that every government vehicle should be sold tomorrow.
But surely, priorities matter.
A child sitting in a classroom without a roof should be more important than the comfort of the person supervising the classroom.
We Must Stop Waiting for Someone Else
There is another uncomfortable truth.
Old students often remember their schools only when there is a reunion.
We gather.
We eat.
We take photographs.
We wear beautiful T-shirts.
We remember our old teachers.
We laugh about who dated whom.
We argue about who was the best footballer.
We tell stories about the senior who used to terrorize everybody.
And then we go home.
Perhaps the reunion should also ask:
What are we leaving behind?
Can we rebuild the laboratory?
Can we renovate the library?
Can we restore the sporting facilities?
Can we repair the classrooms?
Can we provide computers?
Can we restore the school farm?
Can we establish scholarships?
Can we support teachers?
Can we create a maintenance fund?
Can we work with government rather than simply complain about government?
Can we create a transparent structure through which indigenes, old students, government and community leaders can contribute and account for every naira?
Can we stop politicking among ourselves and encourage competent people to lead?
Can we educate the indigenes to vote committed politicians with integrity to manage the affairs of the country at every level of governance?
Because nostalgia is beautiful.
But nostalgia without responsibility is simply remembering what we once had while watching it disappear.
There Was Once a School
That day, standing in my old school, I became emotional.
I shed tears.
Tears for myself.
Tears for the school.
Tears for my country.
And, most importantly, tears for the young people currently attending that school and thousands of other schools like it across Nigeria.
Because the story of my school is not unique.
There was once a school.
A school with flowers.
A school with laboratories.
A school with teachers who cared.
A school with sports facilities.
A school with discipline.
A school where children from different backgrounds came together and learnt not only Mathematics, English and Biology, but also friendship, leadership, responsibility, resilience and survival.
That school helped prepare us for life.
It gave us memories.
It gave us friendships.
It gave some of us the foundation upon which we built our lives.
But now, the question is not merely “What happened to the school?”
The bigger question is:
What happened to us?
What happened to our sense of collective responsibility?
What happened to our belief that public property belongs to all of us?
What happened to the idea that the education of a child is everybody’s business?
And what kind of leaders are we producing when the very schools in which tomorrow’s leaders are being trained are allowed to decay?
We cannot continue to demand good leaders while giving young people poor schools.
We cannot preach excellence while educating children in environments that communicate neglect.
We cannot complain that Nigeria is falling behind the rest of the world while allowing the places where our children are prepared for that world to collapse.
We cannot travel the world asking for investors when we are not training our children to be competent enough to be employed in those businesses when set up.
The future of Nigeria is sitting in those classrooms
Somebody must care.
Government must care.
Communities must care.
Traditional leaders must care.
Parents must care.
Indigenes must care.
Old students must care.
And those of us who were fortunate enough to pass through these schools must ask ourselves a simple question:
What can I do to ensure that the next child who walks through those gates sees hope rather than decay?
Because there was once a school.
And if we are not careful, there will soon be only a story about one.
Let us not allow that to happen.
*Johnson Babalola is a Toronto, Canada lawyer
jblawyer2021@gmail.com
@jblawpro
@jbandthings
@jbdlaw