One a warm November morning, a broad strong teenager paced across the walls of his father’s house pulling together the last button on his shirt. He flashed his teeth across the mirror severally and mirror would have smiled back. At last, he pulled the tie to his neck and slipped out of the room clinging his mortarboard. His father was honking at the driveway and he felt some warm affection engulf him as his son jumped across the terrace of the block of flats they lived and slid into the car.
Ezim Andah, a young university graduate, was one of the first people to march to the International Conference Centre for his convocation as he ceremonially signed out of the four walls of the university that had held him in captive for four consecutive years. He has a few seconds to breathe as he joined the procession and soon found a seat to listen to the series of lectures that silently conveyed the end of a protected life and the deliverance in what many called the real world. He was to sign a new undertaking with life.
He felt his thoughts come to sit with him, snuggle him and take him away from the conference hall. Unlike many like him, Ezim felt he was too young to be there. Not because of what he thought about his age, but for the numerous doubts that beheld him and make him feel unprepared. Life in school, as much as he complained was paradise to many who lived outside its walls. Ezim thought about their family, he wanted more. His father drove a 2005 model Nissan car that they sometimes spent the weekend attending to its ailment. The car coughed at will and when it finally roared to life would go suffocating again. His father would smile and give him an assuring look. That smile meant more now that he sat in the hall waiting to be pronounced graduate, waiting to be pushed into the world, that world.
He did not understand how he had prepared all four years for this time and it seems to suddenly sneak up upon him, like a midnight thief with a sledge hammer, like an eclipse not foretold. He would not have panicked but for the voice of Giwa that echoed in his head. GIWA finished with first class honors and still combed the street after refusing to work as a school teacher. It was unheard of that he has spent nights combing the cobwebs of the library only to be employed as a school teacher and be paid peanuts. He could as well as begun that job several years ago and invested the money he paid to JAMB in his first office shoes.
It was scary that he had to begin that race too. He did not know his father to know too many influential people. Some part of him even felt they were all waiting for him to improve their standard of living. He curved a little smile as he looked around him and to the so many people like him who blinked helplessly at the Vice Chancellor as he made his speech. He wondered if they were thinking like him too. Many had their phones against their faces, recording their last moments as undergraduates, while several others paid attention to their Facebook as people continued to congratulate them.
But the government has helped him with a more year to prepare through the NYSC.
That brought him a sigh of relief.
In these increasingly dangerous climes, he felt they must begin to dissociate from the old lie
Study hard and you will get the best jobs.
The convocation ended before he knew it. And the procession out of the hall began. He got in line and pushed forward, dragging himself into the new life. As he stepped outside the hall, he felt a lease of air brush across his face and the thousands of people waiting for him and the others; amongst them were those that were in his shoes the previous year and had returned for masters.
He smiled and people shouted across him.
Congratulations!
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