Education in Nigeria and its corruptions

It's never over until it's over.

_{Photo by Jesus Monroy Lazcano}

I had received a call yesterday from a friend of mine telling me about a course that I was going to fail if I didn't do something about it. When I asked around on what the issue was, it turned out that one of my practical reports had gone missing and in my school, no practical reports automatically means you failing the course. It doesn't matter what you got in the theory exams, as long as you don't have a practical score then it is believed that you never even sat for the theory exam.

Of course I was surprised when I got the call, this was the first time I was facing such problem in all my time being a student here and seeing how this result happens to be my final year result, having any sort of error on it would automatically mean me having an extra year and also having to pay the school fee for that year again.

I had immediately made some calls and found out that the lecturer in charge of the practical class had misplaced my report and instead of him manning up and admitting his mistake, he was denying the whole thing and what's even more funny is the fact that he's demanding some amount of money from me to make the problem go away.

I won't lie, the money he's demanding for is small compared to the problems I will face if I end up failing that particular course but the question is why should I pay the sum of seven thousand naira (about $5) for a mistake the lecturer made himself. How am I even sure that he didn't hide my reports on purpose in order to extort this money from me.

It's sad that corruption has eaten this deep into our educational system, although I won't lie that if it wasn't for this same corruption, I wouldn't have found out that I was about failing the course because no one would have told me about it because they wouldn't have been in the position to see the result until it was finalised and published for the entire students to see.

Unfortunately it seems like I have no choice but to pay this bribe because my school had released a memo instructing all of its lecturers to submit their results first thing tomorrow morning and once that is done, I won't be able to do anything about that missing report. That was probably why the lecturer waited until it was this late to leak the info to me so that I would feel pressured and succumb to his demands.

I plan on going to his office first thing tomorrow morning to see if there's a way we could work things out, I will probably try to negotiate the bribe to a lesser amount but one thing is certain, and that is that I will have to pay the bribe no matter what, it's the way things are being done over here.