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Around late 2000s I was a regular at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the Federal College of Education, Okene. My sister (now Mrs. Fatele Elizabeth Emmanuel) and her friends would always take me around to enjoy creative wonders of the students of the department. Herself an amazing artist.
It was a community of creative and HARDWORKING people who were always attending to one ass – assignment, please – or the other. It was an academy.
I felt that the department of Fine and Applied Arts, Département de Français (where I belonged at the time), the Department of Music and the Department Physical and Health Education of the college were the surviving justification for Nigeria’s advanced conventional learning experience. Learning was hands-on.
The seriousness (not the hardness) with which we were helped to learn was top-notch. I have a prying eye so getting around these departments was never a challenge. Department de Français did soirée every Wednesday night. Department of Music did coral every week the PHE was a beehive for nonstop human kinetic (as they loved to call it) activities.
In few weeks as a débutant (student of preliminary class also called pre – NCE) in the department of French, I was already featuring in short playlets that were delivered in French language. We were already singing l’hymne national de la France et de Nigéria (French and Nigerian national anthems). The deliberateness of lecturers across these departments remains something I have not seen in any other institution of higher learning I have attended. Though I will forever oppose to the too many courses students were mandated to take, I insist FCE Okene possessed a collection of tutors who wanted and knew how to work.
My French was promising. The social life of the campus was was cool, too. There were many academic and sociocultural activities. For instance, there was the journée francophonie organized by the Department of French. Many cultural activities with great culinary accompaniments were celebrated and we enjoyed them.
The East met the west.
Surprisingly, however, after my preliminary class I embraced the university education few months into my first year. I was weary of the system that cared little about people who had certificates other than a university degree. The fact that the Nigerian military would not consider my certificate of a three or four year rigorous study for a Direct Short Service, made me think of the NCE as unfairly underrated.
I was to ask our mummy, Prof F Oniemayin the then Ag. provost why the NCE was not given a bigger recognition, but my ignorance was promptly curtailed by the simple explanation from a friend that; a university degree is king no matter what they teach. Prof. (Mrs) Funmi Oniemayin is by the way an excellent mother and an astute academic. I was part of a delegation that visited her during one of our journée francophonie. She even tried her tongue on some French. She said ‘bonjour mes enfants’.
Whether my decision to quit the college for a university was smart or not, the fact that my mom continued to work so hard as a teacher but would stay unpaid for several months on end was a prospect I was not willing to experiment with.
It was an emotional experience for me to leave a community I had become so attached to. A community I deeply appreciated. It was never easy leaving a clime where I could quickly dash from au studio de langue to Music Coral. A community where arms in arms I would go with friends to view beautiful works of art in one dash ? and then proceed to the Kinetics. But I left. I had to leave because I could not understand why I would do four years in a full fledged academic institution and still have to spend another three or four years in a university to earn a degree. I felt it was just OK to proceed to that next level. I did.
I thank God for those with enough courage to hold on. I see many of them today who are equally doing fine. Some have struggled to earn their degrees too.
Today, I saw my friend, Fayomi Adekunle Adeniyi’s picture doing his thing. He was doing something he learnt from his Fine Arts course. He and Asaju Belafont Asaju Shalom and a couple of other friends have shown remarkable dexterity in birthing creative pieces of arts. Their works rival everything you would see at important art exhibitions.
But, assuming (just for the purpose of analysis analysis) NCE is all the qualifications they have got, what other injustice would be bigger than placing them at levels below their HND or BSc counterparts who presumably have not their kind of hands-on experience? I cannot think of any!
Like I always advise, entrepreneurship is the first path to justice for my NCE counterparts who have diligently learned about the liver and intestines of their disciplines. It is entrepreneurship that you have the liberty to determine and ‘enforce’ your worth pending when Nigeria will have your time.
– Oshaloto, Joseph Tade is a strategic communication consultant. He is Co-founder Muboson Total Media Ltd.
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