’How we won essay contest’

It was a glowing moment for the three teenagers as they were called to the podium to receive their prizes one after the other. The trio have emerged winners: first and second runner up in the 2013 Bishop Mike Okonkwo annual essay competition. Thus, when they were asked to say a few words in respect […]

It was a glowing moment for the three teenagers as they were called to the podium to receive their prizes one after the other. The trio have emerged winners: first and second runner up in the 2013 Bishop Mike Okonkwo annual essay competition. Thus, when they were asked to say a few words in respect of their new feat, this is what they shared with the crowd:
 Samuel Effion Edet, 15-year-old student of Government Technical College Calabar, Cross River State, who emerged the second runner up was the first to speak. Edet told the gathering that the competition was the first he was participating in and never thought he would win a prize. He disclosed that the feat didn’t come cheap though.
 “I am the type of a person who engages in lots of research and before I sent in my entry for the first stage of the competition, I wrote and re-wrote the essay on the given topic,” Edet who has already passed out of his Technical school with a commendable result, said.
 A third child of his parents, Edet told Daily Trust that he was a bit nervous when he was shortlisted and was invited to Lagos alongside four others to participate in the second stage of the competition. “It was the fear of the unknown”, he said. “But with the grace of God, I surmounted it,” he added.
 He also said the fact that he came third in the competition has given him the inspiration to start participating in similar competitions in the future. He said the next step for him to take now however, is to pursue his dream of gaining admission at University of Calabar (UNICAL) where he hopes to study Political Science.
“My advice to those out there is that, they should always aim for the moon because if they cannot get to the moon, they will surely land in the stars,” Edet said.
 Instructively, Edet’s advice seemed to have manifested more in the life of the first runner-up, Mark Nwanbiankea. A student of Lagos State Senior Model College, Badore. Nwanbiankea, 16, said: “I will say I enjoyed the ingenuity of the competition and that became the motivating factor for me to participate in it this year. I took part in the 2012 edition of the Bishop Okonkwo essay competition and I scored about 67 percent, so I went back to school and when I told my friends that I scored 67 percent and that I came third, they were like: ‘what happened? The organizers must have cheated you.’
 “But inside me, I knew I may have to work harder and that was exactly what I did. And to show a manifestation of my extra effort this year, I scored 75 percent to emerge second which of course was a great improvement over the 67 percent that I scored last year,” Nwanbiankea said.
 A second and the last child of his parents, Nwanbiankea like Edet completed secondary school in June and already, he has his eyes on Princeton University in New Jersey, United States of America where he hopes to study medical administration.
 “My aspiration is to become the first Nigerian medical administrator with respect to the law of the profession.  I have already taken my ISAT examination and I look forward to studying medical administration at Princeton University. My decision to study the course is informed by the fact that many practitioners on the field are just carrying out their duties with little or no regard for the rules and regulations guiding the profession. But I look forward to being a change agent. I will use my position as a medical administrator to enforce the rules when I finally qualify to practice,” Nwanbiankea said.
Such determination seemed to be behind the success of Folatomi Alli-Balogun, the 15-year-old student of Vivian Fowler Memorial College for Girls, Lagos who emerged the overall winner. Folatomi said it wasn’t a smooth journey for her to lift the 2013 trophy of the Bishop Mike Okonkwo essay competition,  as she told the gathering that she was really scared when she discovered she was the only shortlisted female student who participated in the second and final stage of the competition.
 “I admit that when I found out that I was the only female among the top five who came for the second and the last round of the competition, I felt quite uncomfortable because I knew boys are a force to reckon with in the competition. But I prayed to overcome the fear and to remain confident all through. And eventually I emerged the overall best,” Folatomi said.
 The last of three children of her parents, Folatomi said asides reading a lot, she had to engage in personal exercises to fine-tune her eventual entry submission for the first stage of the essay competition. “For the second essay though, I didn’t know what the topic was; I only got myself well prepared ahead of time,” she added.
 She said her desire after secondary school education is to study aeronautical engineering, “because very few Nigerians are studying it.”  She also asked Nigerians to be on the lookout for a written literature from her between now and the next 10 years.
 Folatomi received a plaque, a cheque of N100,000, a laptop computer and a trophy for herself and three desktop computers for her school. Nwanbiankea on the other hand, received a plaque, a cheque of N75,000 and three desktop computers for his school while Edet who is the second runner up collected a plaque, a cheque of N50,000 and a desktop computer for his school.
Notwithstanding the euphoria that greeted the presentation of prizes to the successful essayists, the chief examiner’s report as presented by Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo was simply unflattering. In the examiners’ assessment, issues of intellectual theft which could be regarded as cheating appear to be on the higher scale.
“But unlike the previous years, the quality of entries for this year’s competition is rather low. The evidence of copying, collaboration, lifting from newspapers, text books, the internet and other electronic sources which we see in the entries for this year is not just higher in relation to previous years, but has assumed a frightening dimension to warrant a call for some intervention… One is inclined to think that teachers and parents are actively aiding the practice through collaboration or deliberately overlooking it. In almost every entry which has substance, it is possible to see or suspect the voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau,” Ezeigbo said.
 The chief examiner, who is also a Professor of English at University of Lagos, said one major setback experienced based on the above anomaly was that the committee of the examiners could not get the usual 10 essays that could make the second which is also the final round. Rather, Ezeigbo said, the examiners were forced to settle for only five essays.