Her name is Adunni, a feisty teen with an upstart tongue and ambition, and all she ever wanted was a way up the rungs of society. Born in a fictional village in the southwest, her dreams choked on the greed of a father who wanted her to marry rather than be happy.
His patriarchal failures and Adunni’s unlikely triumph in escaping to Lagos and turning a life of a modern fief to freedom through education is the breath-taking tale of Abi Dare’s best-selling novel, A girl with a Louding voice. It is the futility of a paternal bargain and the collapse of the hubris of a male-dominated clan.
We cannot but draw parallels between Adunni’s quest and biography with the effort of Lagos State government to target the low-born of public schools with a new educational initiative known as Lagosdigitals.com.
And it does not draw attention only to the poor in Nigeria’s big city. It is a parable of the journey to arrest youth adrift, to give the political elite an opportunity for redemption, and to give the young and restless a platform for personal fulfilment.
It is a news story that has not garnered much play or buzz as yet in the society. It does not hoist a piece of cake or bottle of coke, or throw an owambe party. Such stories are boring because they do not spill blood in an era of bandits in Nigeria. They do not spray money, a la Obi Cubana, Buhari’s son’s wedding or the latest being Tiwa Savage’s farewell gig to her father. The news does not eavesdrop on a celebrity’s bedroom or a salacious night in Big Brother Naija.
It is what news directors describe as development news, but the sort that will make a poor rise, a sick into a full and ruddy being, a city part with its rubbles and peer into a rosy light, its reborn self in the horizon.
The programme will enable teachers to fight distance and distractions, to maul illiteracy through the world wide web. They can plan classes with content and context, set exams, examine the students, interact, rebuke or praise, pay special attention to the needy, mentor the promising, encourage the laggard, monitor the classes.
It is a blessing that the pandemic has gifted us. Covid came to us with death in its wings, and it has won with its many sick and many dead, and its long list of graveyards that best the world wars and even some of the brutal pains of natural disasters. But it has woken in many the desire to redefine space and time, to conquer ignorance without human touch. No tactile doom beset a student and their device. We have seen initiatives to help students learn without tears.
But what the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu is starting is to reach the conventional schools, the ones the rich have abandoned, the ones their house helps and gardeners and drivers send their kids and wards. These are the schools the elite wink at, and send their children to the high and lofty ones, like one in Ikoyi where the cars that pick up their kids after school sessions stop traffic with their Benz, SUVs like Toyota Land cruisers, Lexus. It is decibel honks and line of shiny automobile vanity. They cut off the world of traffic and appropriate the street. If you did not know, you would think the vehicles were there to pick a governor or a high-flying celebrity. This happens every day, Monday to Friday. But they are already celebrities, being children. Celebrities by birth. Anonymity of birth. They have seen salvation before they were baptised into the life. It is obvious the parents compete against each other on whose vehicle is newest and poshest. You just have to pass through Bourdillon in Ikoyi on schooldays at lunch hour.
The BOS initiative is a programme still in its infancy and it is working with a few corporate partners like Chronicles Software Development Company. Already MTN is powering a pilot wireless scheme with 100 schools. But its forays into rural Lagos is a capital part.
