Audu Chima Bankole was a very intelligent student when he was in the university. This fact was not alien to him. But in the end, not even his certificate could testify to that.
Here was a man who would wake up every morning with a stiff neck, stiff with pride. He would carry his head so high all day like one suffering from a strained neck. Now, what was left of him was a husk of what was once human, once a graduate.
“Excuse me, but didn't you see the new advert that was printed in the newspaper?” That voice, the voice, it was like a hand which drove and twirled a cold sharpened blade constantly in his pride, deflating it. Every time Mr. Bankole recalled the voice, he felt the twisting and twirling of the blade in the tissue of his soft heart.
The truth was, Mr. Bankole had not seen the new advert that had been printed in the newspaper. “Excuse me, but….” Twirling. How could he? He had just graduated from the university and was searching for his first job. Can such a person afford the luxury of buying newspapers? “Excuse me….” Twirling.
The pang of the twirling steel inside his suffering heart was driving him raving mad. His pride was now like a deflated balloon. “Excuse me but didn't you see the new advert that was printed in the newspaper?” He was silent, hoping the silence would seem he had.
Well, the advert, when he finally saw it, said only graduates with a first-class or second-class upper degree would be considered.
Sitting back now- still unemployed, he clearly recalled that cursed day, one of many to come. He clearly remembered swallowing back the hiccup. He remembered how his stomach had churned with hunger. He had had no breakfast that morning, couldn't afford it actually. Yet, the worse part was, his body had betrayed him. In his rush, he had forgotten to visit the loo. The more he recalled, the more he wondered. After all the previous day's only meal had been so meager that it could not have produced enough grist for his bowels to work on. The rumbling noise made by his empty stomach was like the noise of a steam-engined train rushing through a dark tunnel. His life was like that dark tunnel. His degree below second-class made sure of this.
The experience of Audu Chima Bankole is the experience a Nigerian graduate who leaves University with anything below second-class routinely goes through.
The Reality
What is happening today in Nigeria is appalling. There is a disregard for graduates with third-class and pass degrees. Even those with second-class lower degrees are barely out of the woods. The issue here is the segregation and marginalization of class degrees of the Nigerian graduate. For these graduates, it is either a first-class or second-class upper degree or long and tortuous years of unemployment. It is therefore no surprise when graduates of higher institutions in Nigeria with degrees below second-class get tossed aside with no regard to their resolve, ability or ambition to excel. For them, their judgment is condemnation, which is swift and unfair. And when dreams and hopes are trampled, the result is not different from putting a noose around a man's neck for him to be murdered.
But why is there so much preference by employers for first-class and/or second-class upper degrees? Why all this fetish about these classes of degrees? There have been after all recorded instances where graduates seeking employment with third-class and pass degrees, have performed brilliantly better in aptitude tests and interviews than these so-called first-class and second-class upper degree holders!
At any rate, these classes of graduates are statistically the most unstable category of employee imaginable. The “brain drain” syndrome is a case in point. In fact, it is the dream of this lot of graduates to travel beyond the shores of their country in search of further studies and greener pastures. If truth were told, no Nigerian graduate, fortunate enough to have left the shores of his country would even be keen on returning.
Another effect of the desperate search for first-class and second-class upper degrees is the growing rate of cultism in the higher institutions. In fact, these secret cults no longer have to go the extra mile to throw anonymous and compulsory recruitment night parties in the guise of matriculation parties. The new intakes, aware of the real state of affairs in the higher educational system and its institutions, impulsively sign up! For them, membership in these cults translates to protection from lecturers and the institutional system that they regard as their enemy as well. These cults become instruments of coercion used to milk extra marks out of stingy, mean and unfair lecturers. Through the same coercion, they improve their Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA). These rogues eventually graduate with first-class degrees or at worse, second-class upper degrees.
