Last week, we started this discussion and mentioned that to write a WAEC essay, the student needs two things, a strategy and a template. Can you remember the strategy? The strategy is to choose the questions which afford the student an opportunity to argue. And usually out of the five essay questions, four of them satisfy this condition. Now that we have our strategy, the next thing is to use a template. This template can help you not only in WAEC, but also after, when you need to write something in the university or at work. It’s a tool you can carry with you that will yield benefits for a very long time.
Here’s the template: Point, Prove, Perform, Naysayer and Conclusion. Let me explain each part of the template.
Point: This is your claim, the point you want to make and upon which the rest of the essay revolves. Let’s take an example from last year’s (2017) WAEC. Question number two says: “Write an article suitable for publication in a national newspaper, discussing two major problems facing the country and suggesting ways of solving them.”
You can attack the question by going straight to the point by stating your point like this: “Since the turn of the century, Nigeria has suffered from many problems which came as a result of the new democracy, some of these are the mutations of the old problems but most of which we’d survived up to this point. Two problems, however, threaten to kill us all if nothing is done about them. The problem of farmers-herders clashes has snowballed to such an extent that it gives birth to many dimensions and theories which by themselves lead to more crisis. The second spot of bother is the vexing issue of kidnapping which is now being practiced in almost every region of the country.”
Prove: The second step is to prove your point or claim. In rhetoric, it’s called premises i.e. the reasons that support your claim. And what’s your claim? In step one above, you claimed that two problems of kidnapping and the problems between herders and farmers will consume us all. Step two is where to give reasons to support that claim. How do you do that? If you have statistics available to you, using them is going to help. If not, just strongly state the reasons why you think these are major problems.
For example: “These two problems are united in the kind of adverse effects they cause. The kidnappers have proven they are not overly concern about age or socio-economic status. Accordingly, government ministers, school children, old people, business men, security personnel, poor villagers and even toddlers have been kidnapped and hundreds of millions have been paid in ransom.
“Some of these victims died in the process. And the degenerates are everywhere, they are no longer restricted to our highways. The criminals have kidnapped their own neighbours and even their own family members. The result is that there’s suspicion everywhere; no society can survive this quantum of suspicion for long, because then we’re no longer free. We can’t travel, we can’t go to recreational areas and can’t even allow our children to play in the neighborhood. When that moment comes, as humans, we would device mechanisms for survival such as stereotypes so that we know who poses danger to us and our loved ones; this is already happening in the case of farmer-herder crisis. The Fulani race is now being demonized because most herders are Fulani. This is stereotype thinking.”
Perform: The third steps will show how to solve the problem. You will give steps or ideas on how the problem can be resolved; this WAEC question actually requires that.
Example: “Before a discussion of solutions, we must first account for the causes of these problems. Although Nigeria has almost one million square kilometers of land, according to the World Bank 2016 estimates, Nigeria’s population has grown to 186 million people. The increase in population and the devastating effect of global warming has led to more competition for critical resources including land. Therefore, we should see this as an economic problem. And the problem can be solved by the cattle ranches which the government is now proposing. But even this solution is not new. My uncle told me that Audu Bako, a former governor of Kano State, implementedthis solution successfully in Kano in the 1970s. One of his approaches was to provide artificial insemination and medical services free of charge for the cattle herders. The government may want to revisit his policy so that it could be scaled up nationwide.
“As for the kidnappers, it’s time to employ technology to solve the problem. One such technology is the dash cam – a camera fitted on cars to record incidents on the road. Some nations have made such cameras compulsory for car owners. That way, when road users are being waylaid on the road, the camera can record the incident which will prove valuable to security agencies. We can also use analytics as done in other countries such as the United States to fight crime. Because of the patterns and insightsgain by predictive analytics, the police can tell – within a reasonable probability – where and when a crime will occur.
Naysayer: This is the step where you introduce a naysayer i.e. can you think of what someone opposed to your idea thinking? If you can, don’t forget to mention it. Doing so will give your essay credibility and makes it scholarly. Because scholars always take into consideration those opposed to their ideas.
Example: “Many may disagree that these are the biggest problems we have. Some will count corruption and Boko Haram as our biggest problems. Although I concede that these are huge problems too but the efforts of the government in bringing about resolution of these problems are yielding relative success. However, the two problems I’ve highlighted appear to have befuddled the government and state actors.”
Conclusion: You should close your essay by stating the implications of your argument and suggestions by answering the question “so what?” Here you’ll mention those who are going to benefit or put your ideas into action such as the policy makers, researchers and citizens.
Example: “Solving the problems of the farmers-herders clashes and the tricky case of kidnapping must be solved before our citizens can achieve happiness and peace of mind. Accordingly, the government should take into consideration the ideas expressed here such as employing technology to solve our security problems. Doing so would yield maximum benefits for all concerned.”
Concluded.
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