KEN UGBECHIE

In a season of political defecation marked by defections and delusion, five Nigerian girls gave us something to cheer. The five golden girls of Regina Pacis Secondary School Onitsha, Anambra State pulled a stunt in faraway San Francisco, United States, the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Please take a bow for Miss Promise Nnalue, Jessica Osita, Nwabuaku Ossai, Adaeze Onuigbo and Vivian Okoye, all teenagers in Junior Secondary school. They were among the about 2,000 contestants for this year’s Technovation Challenge, a global digital programme which has become an annual ICT watering hole for girls to test their software application development skills.

This year’s edition featured entries from girls from far more advanced societies including the United States, China and Europe. But our girls triumphed. Yes, the girls from a hitherto unsung school in Onitsha bested them all. Forget the bad leadership that mutilate public space, Nigerians are smart and intelligent. They always win.

Dateline, Busan, South Korea, September 2017: A crop of about five smart Nigerians were flaunting their application development skills at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) annual telecom feast tagged ITU Telecom World. It is usually a loaded telecom show with participants from all over the world. It features exhibitions of products and services by equipment makers and service providers. ITU Telecom World also features competitive moments where nerds showcase their skills. The young Nigerians who took part in the highly competitive pitches did the nation proud, beating off contenders from China and other advanced nations. Nigerians always win.

Back to the girls from Onitsha school. They developed an app to address a critical health challenge in Nigeria: proliferation of substandard (fake) drugs. They had the branding wisdom to tag their app FD Detector. This is against all odds. To add to the shine, they had competition from Americans and Europeans with all their exposure and opportunities; but they held their nerves to lead the global assemblage of female geeks. The team of teens was groomed by Chief Executive Officer, Edufun Technik STEM, Uchenna Onwuamaegbu Ugwu. That was the hand that moulded the impressionable minds of these teens such that they trounced girls from other advanced jurisdictions namely.

And to think that this is happening at a time the political leadership of the nation made up of geriatrics and all manner of advanced adults was stinking up the public space with banal manifestations only fit for the Stone Age. The girls brought the nation honour at a time their leaders were too busy fighting for their political survival and relevance than for public good.

The girls more than anything demonstrated that there is still a whimper of hope from whatever the clan of locusts and caterpillars are leaving behind. They showed that in the midst of a deliberate institution of a lousy policy to admit students into schools on the basis of geographical mappings and not on the strength of merit, there are still oases of excellence.

But there is no success without effort. Excellence does not come by excessive sleep and slothfulness, it comes as a consequence of thorough preparation usually in a ready and steady environment. Regina Pacis Secondary School, Onitsha was a ready and steady environment for excellence. I have always admired the Catholic Church for its unrelenting pursuit of and promotion of knowledge. It’s become traditional right from the Vatican to the most rural precincts of the globe for the Catholic Church to seek to democratize knowledge through affordable and principled school system.

The case of Regina Pacis School is no different. The school, once annexed by government, was returned to the Catholic Church, its original owners, in 2010 by former governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi. That gesture was both telling and compelling. Spokesman for Peter Obi, Valentine Obieyem, was quick to connect the dots in the aftermath of the golden outing of the five African Ambassadors. He drew a nexus between the state-wide education reforms undertaken by Peter Obi government which precipitated not just in the return of schools to missions but also a courageous and deliberate computerization policy which brought students of Anambra schools face to face with computers, most of them for the first time in their lives. He recalls that soon after the return of schools to churches, Anambra schools came tops in WAEC, NECO and other external examinations for three consecutive years.

In effect he links the success of the girls to their early exposure to internet-enabled computer powered by generators all donated by the Obi government. That was when the seed was sown.  Peter Obi government was said to have partnered Hewlett Packard (HP),  Zinox Computers and Galaxy Backbone. HP provided 22, 300 laptops and printers for the 330 secondary schools in the state, Zinox Computers ensured that the systems had integrated applications deployed professionally while Galaxy Backbone created the last-mile Internet connectivity for the schools. This was how a digital consciousness culture was born in Anambra schools.

Zinox Chairman, Leo Stan Ekeh, said his firm partnered the state government to install 25,000 complete units of systems deployed professionally in a project he described as the “largest single ICT investment by any state in the country in terms of deployment and training.”

So, here it is. The Regina Pacis School feat was not wished into existence. Success is the direct outcome of planning and preparation. It’s not accidental. If in doubt, look to India. This is one nation that has in the past decades challenged America in the area of software engineering. Over 50 percent of software deployed in the United States came from the ceaseless exertions of Indians. Indian government many years ago decided to tweak the academic curriculum by making it more numerate than ever. The government followed it up with the deployment of lowly-priced computers to schools.  This deliberate policy to make Indian students and pupils computer-literate is paying off today.

Nigeria can ride on the crest of digitalization to win the future. This can only come with government resolve to invest in technology-based capacity building not just for Nigerian students but also for their teachers. Nigeria is endowed with natural resources but she lacks the technical capacity to fully maximize those resources.

When Zinox and others partnered the Peter Obi government to automate Anambra schools and impart ICT skills in the students, many may have dismissed such gesture as nebulous. But knowledge is never nebulous and there is neither limit nor a better time to acquire it. The public relations mileage garnered by Nigeria by the feat of five teenagers from a school many Nigerians have never heard about until now cannot be quantified. No amount of government propaganda would have achieved such.

Ekeh sums it up succinctly: “Nigerian leadership should know that the kids are now global leaders. If Nigeria was being traded on the stock market, we would have moved 5,000 per cent; if they are graduates, those kids would have been employed anywhere in the world and paid the best salaries.”

In simple language, Nigeria must rally to win the future by investing in human capital today. There is no short cut to glory. By the way, these five teens deserve scholarship to guarantee their flight to fame.

Culled from Sunday Sun