BY Maria Oluwabukola Oni
Instructions: Read and carefully answer each question before moving on to the next. Each question carries 10 marks. Good luck!
1. You’ll be living your life quietly but someone somewhere is watching you, plotting to involve you in a joint shege or doom that is about to befall them. They’ll leave their family and friends and choose YOU. Because a problem shared with a stranger is a problem solved. This is my hypothesis as my family and I got home that Sunday to find out someone extremely sneaky had crawled through the unfinished ceiling at the back of the house and down from the access panel into our apartment. Our mobile devices, gadgets and cash were nowhere to be found. What is the reasoning or explanation for this phenomenon of the have-nots preying on other have-nots in times of inflation and lack under the kakistocracy we find ourselves in today?
2. Lagos has the highest employment rate in Nigeria, according to surveys. At 41.7%, it is a far cry from Rivers State, the second highest, which holds at 15.1%. However, these reports do not mention that the high rate is due to the abundance of menial jobs available in every corner in Lagos. This means that decent-paying office jobs are few, placed in industrial areas, and require that a huge chunk of the salary is spent on daily transportation. Unfortunately, the fastest means of transport in congested Lagos now faces a ban with police officers constantly raiding motor parks to cart away motorbikes–some people’s means of livelihood. Yet, new jobs aren’t created, old ones aren’t sustainable, fuel price continues to escalate, the commuters’ transport cost is increasing, and the road networks aren’t expanded for ease of traffic.
Is the ban of commercial motorbikes the solution to bad roads and accidents in Lagos? Oil tankers and container trailers are reported on the news daily for claiming lives in the hundreds, but they still drive hard and drunkenly on narrow streets and highways without an active road regulatory body monitoring them.
3. A young man who moved into a rented apartment began to notice strange disappearance of his items and appliances a few weeks later. He installed a hidden camera outside his flat and was shocked to see the house agent had a spare key which he unrestrainedly used to enter the apartment while the young man was at work. This is after the house agent had collected twice the house rent as scouting fee and agent commission. Briefly meditate on the feeling of entitlement and lawless greed in our society. How can these parasitic middlemen–house agents–be successfully erased from Nigeria’s real estate sector?
4. Schools, starting from nursery classes, peg tuition fees at one hundred and fifty thousand naira (₦150,000) and above. Twenty toddlers or more are assigned to just two teachers whose pay ranges are between thirty thousand naira (₦30,000) and forty-five thousand naira (₦45,000) monthly. In populated schools, one class has a batch of subgroups such as Nursery 1 Abacus, Nursery 1 Berry, Nursery 1 Coral and thelike. Calc lulate the discrepancy between the incredibly high school fees and teachers’ peanut pay in a term.
5. Have you or anyone in your family ever benefited from government empowerment and alleviation programs advertised on mass media? Are you aware of the shady ones secretly enjoyed by government officials and their pals alone? The real people in need do not know of these programs and can’t be beneficiaries even if they do because they do not have a ‘personal person’ in public office. My mum got wind of such yearly empowerment programs held at the Secretariat of the Chief Mandate Director where each participant would receive one hundred thousand naira (₦100,000) as business support. On getting to the office, my mum was asked for the access code. Apparently, the program was announced in a private group and members had registered their names and those of their families as beneficiaries. My mum was promptly turned away.
My mum’s friend who gave her the information later told her that at the end of the one-week business training, the participants got just fifty thousand naira (₦50,000) each. The government had released one hundred thousand naira (₦100,000) for each of the two hundred participants but the unscrupulous organizers halved each person’s share to enlarge their bottomless pockets. Examine how situations such as this relate to you as a citizen of this country.
6. In a society where there is an obvious absence of checks and balances in public office except when it’s time to witch hunt someone, journalists are the saviors of the commoners. They bring to broad light the clandestine activities and government policies created to undercut citizens’ comfort and progress. But the opposite is the case here and journalists who can’t keep shut or sell their souls are victimized and hounded till they flee the country. The fearless journalists within the country are incarcerated. The ones outside the country remain in danger of their lives when their home government writes to the foreign authorities to extradite them on grounds of terrorism and asset to public unrest. Imagine how this affects the growth and continuity of independent, investigative journalism in Nigeria.
7. “Your wife is not your family. Your family are your children, parents, and siblings.” Why then do you give her your name and the ceremonial title ‘wife’? There are appropriate names for women you aren’t responsible for–baby mama, friend, colleague, lover and so on. In the same vein, why do men avoid sweet foods such as ice cream, potatoes, bananas etc. but do not mind emptying a cup of sugar in their cereal or garri? Who are they deceiving?
Analyze this paragraph from a tweet:
My father refused to give me one of his pieces of land to develop because I’m a woman. Land grabbers have sold the land to someone else, a man. Help me thank God.
Who deserves the praises? God? The devil? Or the land grabbers? Discuss the predominance of women being treated as second-class humans in their family and the society.
8. My great, great Iya Agba (great-great-grandmother) had the habit of dying and resurrecting many hours later as her burial arrangements were being planned. The last time, her children bathed and laid her in the funeral parlor expecting her to wake up as usual. But her body had turned cold and she was gone forever. Identify the possibility of a person buried according to Muslim rites, i.e. coming back to life and finding themselves wrapped up from their head to feet and tied round with a rope inside the ground. Is this a practice of the belief: ‘It is appointed for a man to die once?’ Or is it a sacred topic to discuss and there are no such cases?
9. Remember how you thought you were dull, different from other children, and had faulty reasoning due to the sudden outbursts and overdone scolding from your parents? How they always compared you with your siblings and peers?
“Why did you do this task this way? Don’t you see your mate, Ivie? Is this how she would have done it? Is this how I do it?” my mum would scream.
“I thought this method would be easier and better,” I replied.
“What do you mean easier and better? The method I showed you is the way it’s been done for ages, before I was born, before you were born. Lazy complainer,” she would yell with slaps. I grew older and realized my thinking was right and I was taught wrongly and treated unjustly. I became livid and sought redress but an African parent never apologizes nor acknowledges their mistakes.
“Why are you bringing that issue up now? After all these years? It was my place to correct you which I did. Are you the only child that was spanked by her parent?” my mum yelled when I confronted her.
She didn’t listen to me then. She still doesn’t listen to me now. I began to see that most of our parents either had ADHD, insomnia, schizophrenia, depression, or were neurodivergent. But this knowledge doesn’t bring relief or forgiveness. I need closure. I need to hear the elusive words of acknowledgment which I’ll never get.
Compare your experiences with the whole text. Are there major differences? We all need therapy.
10. With the foregoing, answer this truthfully, “How are you? How are you coping?”