Throughout last week the old boys of Government College, Keffi, and their associates have, at one event or the other, been celebrating the 70th year of the great institute.
The college has come a long way in its seventy-years journey, during which it established a pedigree of academic excellence particularly in the Northern part of the country. In its heyday of the 1960s and 70s, the college produced the best results in these parts, in both WASC and HSC results, year in, year out. Consequently, it crowded the admissions into all the faculties of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, the only university in the north as well as making strong showing in other far-flung higher institutions in the country and abroad.
Records show that up till the late 1940s there was hardly a government secondary school in the entire northern region, that is, besides, the handful established by the missionaries. And as the pressure was mounting to reduce the gap with the more advanced southern region it became imperative for the government in the north in 1948 to engineer an accelerated Five Year Educational Development Plan to take care of these needs. It was out of that plan that the two Government Colleges that would dominate the educational landscape in the north emerged. Somehow, the two colleges seem to have some linkages to the old Katsina Teachers College, the first higher institution in the north that was opened in 1912. That was where most of our first generation political leaders (Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Sardauna Ahmadu Bello, Shettima Kashim Ibrahim) graduated from.
Then the colonial administration decided for some inexplicable reason to move the Katsina institution to Kaduna in 1938 to become a proper college for younger students. The movement to Kaduna coincided with the start of the 2nd World War and the Kaduna College, as it came to be known, remained in some doldrums camped in temporary buildings till the late 1940s. After the war, the decision was taken in 1949 to have two colleges in the north. Zaria and Keffi were selected as sites. The college at Keffi was to take students from the southern provinces of the north, i.e., Ilorin, Kabba, Benue, Plateau, Niger, Bauchi and Adamawa, while the one to be sited at Zaria was to admit students from the rest of the Northern Provinces.
The students in Kaduna College were then moved to Zaria to start the Government College which years later was renamed Barewa College. The buildings they vacated in Kaduna were then used to accommodate the first students of Government College Keffi, because the school buildings in Keffi were still under construction. The college started with a preponderance of expatriate teachers, with Mallam Isa Koto as the only Nigerian teacher. The stay in Kaduna for the pioneer students of Government College Keffi proved to be longer than expected. However, when the time to move to the Keffi permanent site came in 1954 they went in batches, ending the exercise the following year. Aliyu Makaman Bida, the Northern Minister of Education, then, came to perform the official opening ceremony of the college in December 1955.
The Northern Nigerian Government made sure the college lacked nothing, in terms of infrastructure, to make for a conducive learning environment. The college was the size of a big village, with classes and dormitories for the students and separate quarters for the staff. There was a library brimming with books, with current journals and national and international newspapers on the shelves. The laboratories for the individual subjects were so well stocked that they could be the envy of some of the present day universities. The sporting facilities were equally splendid. There was a comprehensive athletic pavilion, a cricket pitch (one of the few in the country), five football fields, a hockey field, basketball, volleyball courts, a lawn tennis court and a table tennis table in every dormitory.
The Northern Nigerian Government also took its supervisory role very seriously. The Premier, Ahmadu Bello, Sardaunan Sokoto, visited often. The Minister of Education, Aliyu Makaman Bida was a regular visitor as well as Isa Kaita who took over from him in 1957. It is no wonder that in those years only a few schools could point at better examination results than Government College, Keffi. One of the most outstanding years was 1961 when the college scored a record 100% pass in the West African School Certificate. A modest 90% was the score for my set of 1971. In sports, Government College, Keffi dominated the schools in the Northern Region and took most of the cups and shields whenever there was inter-school competition. The highly coveted Philips Cup for athletics and the Davies Cup for football competed for among northern secondary schools was perennially in the bags with the Keffi College.
One advantage the college had, which it shared with many colleges of the time, was the admission policy that was transparently merit-based. Even though the admission policy of the college was altered in 1962 to incorporate all the twelve provinces of Northern Nigeria they made efforts to always pick those who were outstanding in the annual common entrance examinations. Like all public schools then, there was a level playing field getting into the college. When I came into form one in 1967, I met a motley crowd of children coming from a variety of background. There were children of high ranking officials of government, big businessmen, farmers, fishermen and other commoners. Some of the kids came from elite primary schools such as the Kaduna Capital School, already exposed and speaking the Queen’s English whereas many of us were from inner cities and could hardly communicate in English Language. One of the students in my set, and a good friend, who is now a Professor came from remote Abadam on the shores of Lake Chad. He had some initial difficulty in adjusting to life in the college because he could only effectively communicate in Kanuri Language. Nevertheless, in a few days and learning from each other we all moulded.
Many of us would have various recollections of the old college. The most memorable would, of course, be the austere, and disciplined lifestyle in the college. Retired Supreme Court Justice James Ogebe who went to the college from 1956 to 1962 in a piece he contributed to the school magazine in 1974 wrote: “Personally I am convinced that the greatest heritage of Keffi College does not lie in its brilliant academic performance or its outstanding achievements in sport but in its discipline. Under the almost military discipline I came into at Keffi in 1956 we were taught to respect constituted authority, our seniors in class, not necessarily in age. This was done in a refined manner. Throughout my stay in Keffi the students were able to run their affairs with little or no assistance from the Principal and his staff. Discipline was part and parcel of the system and students grew in it naturally without any bitterness.”
Sadly, Keffi College was afflicted with the same ailment that affected other great public institutions of the time. State creation made them provincial and with time, the intake ballooned. From 49 students in 1949 to 120 in my set of 1967, the intake swelled to 1250 in 1978. Additionally, Keffi College went from being owned by the Northern Region Government to Benue-Plateau State in 1968, to Plateau State in 1976, and then to Nasarawa State in 1996. Resources to run the college contracted with each change of ownership. Thus infrastructure and standards deteriorated.
But those of us who had the benefits of the good times still remember.
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