Fellow alumni of Government Secondary School Afikpo:

Happy New Year!

As this new day ushers in a new year – a momentous year in which, by the grace of Almighty God, the son of an African will become the President of the United States of America – we fervently hope and pray that it will also herald the beginning of a new dawn for our alma mater in particular, and for our country and her people in general. For we are now poised to begin to restore GSSA to its previous position of preeminence among world class secondary schools.

One senses that in some quarters we are seen as naïve. How do we dare to think that we will reverse the decay of GSSA when our country and her leaders do not care about education? It is true that our longsuffering people have become used to bad governance. They seem to have reconciled themselves to the evil of kleptocracy in the shadow of which tens of billions of dollars disappear overnight and no one is held accountable. In public, some – perhaps most – Nigerian leaders mouth the usual policy platitudes. But it is all a charade. For it is an open secret that, behind closed doors, they plot the wholesale looting of government treasuries which they seem to view as their private bank accounts. Meanwhile school buildings are crumbling. Education is neglected and is adulterated because students are allowed to cheat in exams and some teachers sell grades. The infrastructure decays and crumbles: railroads are rusting away and trains no longer run; roads are not maintained and are full of potholes; postal services are barely functioning; land based telephone lines are disappearing; electrical power is off more than on. It is as if a whole country has gone mad and the ship of state has cut loose from its moorings and has lost its way and is adrift in perilous waters without a compass. To say that most of our leaders have no vision would be the understatement of the century. And yet we are reminded that “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Contrast this with what is happening in other countries. In South Korea, there are secondary schools dedicated to preparing their students for admission to the great Ivy League universities of America. In India, the Indian Institutes of Technology are catapulting that great nation towards the upper echelons of industrialized nations. In Japan, the school system is legendary for its rigor. In China “Project 211” has a goal of establishing a network of a hundred world classuniversities in the near future. In the US, President-Elect Barack Obama has declared that “Our success as a nation depends on our success in education” and is giving education well deserved priority to bolster the ability of the US to compete with other nations. During a Labor Party Conference in Britain in 1996, a future British Prime Minister said: “Ask me my three priorities for Government and I will tell you: education, education and education.” All these countries not only maintain their traditional infrastructures but are laying down the great infrastructure of modern times: a network for universal access to high speed internet to put enormous amounts of information literally at the fingertips of their people including their students. And in Nigeria? All the once great “leadership academies” are in inexorable decline. Kings College Lagos, Government College Ughelli, Government College Ibadan and other such schools were not directly affected by war yet are no longer the great secondary schools they once were, thanks to neglect and abandonment. Their buildings have also begun to crumble. Needless to say and as we all know, the situation in the former Eastern Nigeria is much worse and is simply a tale of devastation and disaster.

While other countries power full throttle ahead, Nigeria is like a car in reverse. While others advance and progress Nigeria retreates and regresses. Not surprisingly, this trend is underpinned by an inversion of values that pervades all aspects of life. In politics, for instance, the rigging of elections is now the norm. This after all is how the thieves gain access to government treasuries they plan to loot – in broad daylight. In education, school buildings are not maintained and are allowed to crumble while money is stolen and diverted to the construction of huge private mansions. Teachers are often not paid or are paid poorly and, to survive, some of them sell grades and students are allowed to cheat in exams. That is the new “normal”.

Among the people of Ebonyi State in particular, you see a most remarkable and improbable, if perverse, feat of alchemy. The people of Ebonyi State were handed the crown jewel of secondary education in Eastern Nigeria. To date they still do not appear to have any understanding of, or appreciation for, what was given to them. As a result they have come close to transforming a chunk of sparkling diamond – GSSA – into a sack of coke. Can you imagine what would have happened if the leaders of Ebonyi State showed sufficient enlightenment or had enough vision and foresight to spend a few naira to maintain GSSA. It would have meant an annual output of several future doctors, several future engineers, several architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, educators and other professionals they cannot have now. What did they do? They closed down the residential section of the school and allowed it to rot away and decay. They made the school a day school – a state in which she could not possibly fulfill her mission to the best of her ability. They said they had no money. Now resuscitating the school will take orders of magnitude more resources than would have been used just to maintain the school a few years ago. And lest you think I am singling out Ebonyi State, let me tell you that the same is true of virtually every state in Nigeria. It just happens that Ebonyi State is the state where I really was educated. That is where I grew up. That is where my heart is. That is where my loyalty belongs. It is also my state in a certain sense. I owe a lot to Ebonyi State. If I had not been so well taken care of as a child living in Ebonyi State, I would surely not be where I am today.

Under the current circumstances it is difficult to be optimistic. It is difficult to see how things will change and get better in our country. Cynics and skeptics have a field day. The taint of corruption has permeated the entire fabric of our society. Many good people give in to corruption to take care of their families; others because “everybody is doing it”. Many others fear for their lives if they are seen as not subscribing to the prevailing ethos of corruption among those in authority. As a result this evil – this crime – is losing its stigma. Darkness has enveloped our land. Our country reels under the pall of a long night.

This situation, while daunting and seemingly bleak, must not discourage us and vindicate the skeptics. On the contrary, it should harden our resolve and spur us to action. If it be considered naïve to want to rebuild a crumbling citadel of learning, let us gladly plead guilty and studiously guard and maintain our naiveté. We must realize that because of the pervasive evil and misrule, what we are about to do has become extremely important. It must no longer be viewed simply as a sentimental gesture by a bunch of old boys, overcome by nostalgia for a romanticized past, and determined to give something back out of gratitude to a place to which they rightfully feel a passionate attachment. No. It is much more than just that.

What we are about to do is to light a light that will shine in the darkness such that the darkness will not extinguish it. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that.”

This light will be a beacon of hope for millions of our good people who know that despite the decadence, despite the hypercorruption and despite the irresponsibility and crisis of values of the moment, education is of vital importance to the very survival of our country. Hopefully this beacon will point the way to others. It will be a symbol that will remind our people that: “Though the cause of evil prosper; Yet ‘tis truth alone is strong” It will be a shining city on the hill reminding leaders who may have lost their bearings that this is what they should really be doing – building excellent schools that will prepare our children for a globalized future in which –like it or not – they will be competing for a place under the sun against the Indians and Chinese and Koreans and Japanese and Russians and Brazilians and Argentines not to talk of Americans and British and other Europeans. Our country’s only hope for survival is to give our children the best education possible and begin to industrialize and empower our people for such competition. That is what Japan did a little more than a century and a half ago when she was forced to open her gates to foreigners and found herself in a very weak position relative to the foreign powers. Our country must not tempt other countries with the kind of weakness that we showed in the past. Otherwise history will repeat itself. Our people might as well prepare themselves for “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. By not paying attention to education, our country is sewing the proverbial wind and the harvest can only be the whirlwind. In future, any country with power will find a pretext for invading Nigeria, taking over our oil fields and forcing our people into de facto servitude. Far fetched? Go and ask the people of Iraq what happened to them in this decade. And bear in mind that Iraqis are a proud people who count among their heritage the most ancient of known human civilizations; and that modern Iraq is more advanced in many ways than Nigeria. In the final analysis, no country owns anything they cannot defend.

This should be the best of times for our country. But it is turning into the worst of times. The revenue from oil has reached record levels in recent months. The country is awash in cash. But – perversely – this money is concentrated to a variable degree in the hands of no more than a quarter of a million people in a country of 130 million. These are either the people who have direct access to the money because of their position of power and public trust or those who know that these highly placed people are stealing the money and therefore have to be paid off handsomely to keep them silent once they too have become accomplices because they have been tainted by the payoff. Because the money is not used to improve and upgrade the lives of our people, oil boom has become oil doom to most Nigerians. It is indeed a Dickensian tale of two cities.

As the darkness thickens, we can only once again turn to God in a prayer, all too familiar to those who were present for House and School (evening) prayers at GSSA, and say: “Lighten our darkness we beseech Thee O Lord; And by Thy great mercy, defend us, our alma mater and our country, from all the perils and dangers of this night.”

And as the very survival of our alma mater hangs in the balance; as we gird our loins and roll up our sleeves for the work ahead; as we rise to the challenge posed by the crumbling buildings of that magnificent institution, the words of a man, who led his country at a time of great peril, ring in our ears: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if GSSA and her alumni organizations last a thousand years, men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour’.”

And to all our alumni, even as I wish you and yours a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year, once again I issue a clarion call:

Rise up!  Men of GSSA

Be done with lesser things

Give heart and soul and mind and strength

To serve the school we love

Rise up! Men of GSSA

The school for you doth wait

Her strength unequal to her task

Rise up! Make her great again.

Finally to those skeptics and cynics who doubt that we can restore our alma mater, let us rise up and with one voice “respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: ‘Yes, We Can!’”

Thank you. May God bless you and yours. And may God bless and preserve GSSA.

Obi Nnaemeka (Tony) Nwasokwa, M.D., Ph.D.

Chairman, Board of Trustees, GSSAAA.

School Captain, GSSA, 1967.