Why keep the North-South cut-off dichotomy

Norway is getting ready to construct a highway under the ocean for its ships. The country already burrowed tunnels for all other forms of transport, perhaps including airplanes. Norwegians are silly people playing God with holes just like their compatriots who built the Channel Tunnel. Muzungus don’t use their witchcraft to kill their brightest, rather they observed birds and built airplanes; they studied sharks and whales to invent submarines. This level of wizardry is why you would never catch me dead flying or riding a submarine; I dey craze? I don’t like taking the Channel Tunnel and I visit Stockholm or send Rotimi Amaechi there for any reason.

As a nation, Naija has failed and our kind of failure is not a bad thing it is a national badge of honour. Our dear Sai Baba is in a London hospital convalescing and we are kept in the dark as to what ails him – another badge of honour we must keep.

Not long ago, says the usually unreliable sources, the National Common Entrance Examination Board, NCEE, released the results of the 2017 exams and the cut-off marks for entrance into federal institutions. According to the figures, Anambra, the legendary state where only girls study and earn degrees and boys trade and earn money led the pack. Two of its students scored 189 out of 200. 

According to the trend in Naija, most girls prefer Queens’ College and FGCs except the one in the heartland of Haramistan, which received only 20 wishes. With over 100 Chibok girls still in Boko Haram hands, who would want their daughters in the wrong place? Safety is what the people perceive it to be, not Sai Baba’s say so.

A look at the cut-off marks reminds one of Naija’s abysmal serial failures at major international sporting events. Students from 18 states – Abia, Enugu, Imo, Kwara, Ondo, Akwa-Ibom. Benue, Edo, Kogi, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Oyo and Rivers, Ebonyi and Ekiti need to hit the sixty marks score to further their education. Those from the FCT, Plateau, Bayelsa, Kaduna and Cross River score an average ten points lower for the same opportunity. The rest could weigh way below average to make it beyond primary school. In the world we live in, they would be competing with Norwegians or the Fins.

Pupils from Sokoto, Zamfara, Taraba and Bauchi are shamelessly on the lowest rung of the achievement ladder requiring a paltry 20 to qualify. If you come from Sokoto, where government feeds those who are fasting with funds running into billions of Naira, you only need 15 marks to qualify if you are a boy and seven if you are a girl. If you are a Zamfara boy, 14 would do and 12 for girls while Bauchi adheres to the equality rule setting its own cut-off at 18 for male and female. 

Remember that to be from any state in Naija except Lagos, you must be an ‘indigene’. If your parents come from any other part, it would not matter if they have lived longer than Methuselah elsewhere, they remain ‘aliens’ or more appropriately ‘settlers’, meaning you must send your brain back home to score with indigenes of your state. As they say in Naija – who school epp? Lame Pat is not just the most persecuted first lady by her own admission, she is on record as the most-educated among the pack having to her credit a NCE, B. Ed and a PhD from the University of Port Harcourt. This may be why she dusted Shakespeare in Okrika Engrish. 

There is nothing wrong with us! We the northerners who are educationally disadvantaged and loving it must fight to retain and maintain this status quo. In fact, we should cry marginalization and petition the UN against Mama Charlie and her agents. At independence in 1960, there were only 41 secondary schools in the northern region as against 842 in the southern part. This marginalization has taken more than six decades to redeem and must be actionable under extant international laws. We must lower the cut-off marks until everybody is equal as they are in the sight of Allah. We should insist on keeping the standard low until we get there. 

On the national level, we should insist forever on the federal character principle so that those who read books better than libraries do not put us at a disadvantage. What is merit if not favouritism. Why should those who read the books of men take advantage over those who read the laws of the divine? 

We must never change these things until we are all even and with some states budgeting more for feeding the poor during Ramadan than they budget for the recruitment of qualified teachers, this is not only impossible but unattainable. No southerner should get a pensionable appointment in any northern institution, that privilege should be left for our brothers from Islamic states that prepare our children for jannah. The indigeneship and citizenship structure must be highlighted in our constitution and institutions because it has worked wonders for our quest to catch up with the rest of the nation. It must be maintained until we say so. 

I predict and prophesy that very soon, we the north would overtake Norway in building highways to heaven instead of burrowing holes from Kaura Namoda to Kano or Makurdi to Maiduguri. There’s a reward for this – in heaven!