Youth of Today

Photo credit: dailystreet.com

I thought I had heard it all till someone who read my last post stated that some parents pay  mercenaries to take common entrance examinations for their children; just like the name implies it is common for crying out loud. Why on earth would you do your child such injustice? I thought such illegal act only happened with external examinations for Tertiary Institutions.

 

I have heard of special centres where the answers are dictated to the candidates so they have an advantage over those who did not pay for special centres. Hmm.. money talks, bullshit works. Why do we then complain about the quality of adults we have today? When I engage some young people, I wonder if they saw the walls of a school. The way some of them reason and the manner with which they speak leave me sad.

 

I wonder who will take over from these old insensitive men who are running our country like their private companies and in my opinion, only a few youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow. 

 

When my children were younger, I would always ask them what they would eat and then proceed to give them exactly what they had mentioned. I came to my senses the day I made beans porridge and one of them vehemently refused to eat the food. No matter how hard I tried to convince him, he wouldn’t budge."Beans makes you strong, it makes you grow really tall, beans makes you smart" etc, but all my logic fell on deaf ears and he would rather stay hungry. I felt really bad, like I had failed in my duties.

 

Our mothers were a lot firmer with us than we are with our children these days. I remember my experience with mother; I was eight years old and in Primary School. Breakfast was served that morning and I was disappointed when I got to the dining table to see a plate of golden brown yam pottage staring at me. I immediately started throwing a tantrum, I refused to eat the food and while I waited to be given something else to eat, I heard the jingle that ushered in the 7am news over the radio. That was every school child’s nightmare; it meant that you were already running late for school. 

 

Ngozi was the nanny and very much like her she ignored me, it was the first time as far as I remember of yam pottage being served as breakfast in the Eke’s home. Mother rushed out of her room, her own radio had also alerted her. She asked why I didn’t touch my food and I quickly reported to her that sister Ngo wouldn’t give me something else to eat. I hoped that she would scold the nanny and ask her to make me a toast or something but my dear mother disappointed me. “Will you get up from there and go to the car?” she shouted. She did not care that her eight year old princess was going to school on an empty stomach.

 

All the odds must have been against me on that day, no breakfast, mother disappointed me and then I had to deal with an unusual long school assembly. The teacher in charge on that day must have conspired with the gods to teach me a lesson, she prayed and prayed and at some point her voice sounded so distant, I opened my eyes to see that I was still in my school and I could only see blue. 

Thank God for the two teachers who were quick enough to catch me before I got to the ground, I was lifted from the assembly ground to the stage and when I opened my eyes I was being fanned by some people who I had never seen. I also felt sticky on the face and when I sat up I noticed that my school uniform was wet.

 

All I heard was “Thank God oh! Thank God oh!” then it dawned on me that I must have passed out, I gently got up and walked straight to my class with my teacher holding my hand. The strangers who had fanned me back to life were all staff but in my daze they looked alien to me. The sticky white stuff on my face was glucose and my uniform got wet from the water that was poured on me.

 

When we got to my class, Miss Dioka my class teacher asked what I had breakfast and I said nothing, she quickly let me help myself to the snacks I had in my bag before it was break time. I fainted on the assembly ground because I wouldn’t eat yam pottage. “Well, it would be a big lesson to mother” I thought and I couldn’t wait to tell her what happened to me.

 

I narrated my story to mother that afternoon over lunch but she was so unperturbed which shocked me a great deal. I nearly died and this woman was just there licking oha soup off her fingers and also chewing aggressively on the biscuit bone in her hand.

 

The following day, I was thinking of how to face my friends in school and how to answer the many questions they would ask.  Those were my thoughts as I walked to the dining table in my school uniform and long white socks. The shock nearly killed, starring at me yet again was a plate of steaming hot yam pottage. My own mother wanted to kill me but I was not going to let her.

I sat down without saying a word but my prayer before food, I ate every single piece of yam on my plate and from that day my love affair with the yam began. It’s been thirty three years since then and my love for yam will never ever come to an end.

 

The other day my son who over 6ft tall and still avoids eating beans and asked me if it was lack of beans in his system that made him so tall. Such sacarsm can only come from the Youth of today.