By C. Don Adinuba
There is so much the Igbo can celebrate about themselves. Take their brilliant performance in education which is phenomenal. Whether in the West African School Certificate examination or the Joint Admissions Matriculation examination or the entrance examination into Federal Government Colleges or into the Federal Government-owned School for the Gifted and Talented in Abuja, the story is the same. Even in global educational competitions, the Igbo are outstanding.
This is by no means fortuitous. By 1945 when the Second World War ended, there were a handful of Igbo graduates because the Igbo live in the interior; the Europeans who brought education to Nigeria came through the seas. Yet, within 20 years the people had begun to compete effectively with the Yoruba who had a historical advantage of over half a century over them in terms of higher education; the Yoruba have towns like Badagry and Lagos which are on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. By 1965, the Igbo had, as Chinua Achebe put it in The Trouble With Nigeria, ”wiped out their educational handicap in one fantastic burst of energy”.
