Anjolaoluwa Mautin Botoku cannot lay substantial
claim to widespread fame. She has however served
notice that her name is one that the world should
watch out for in the future. At her very tender age,
she has written a dreaded examination and did
creditably.
The examination is the General Certificate of
Education (GCE), the private equivalent of the
Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSCE)
that people wishing to gain admission into the
university must pass in order to be admitted.
GCE and SSCE are however dreaded because many
people are only able to pass them after years of
trying. So when little Anjola perused some of the GCE
past question papers that one of her brothers was
studying and declared that she could take the GCE
exam, her brothers Jide and Olujuyin were both
amused and incensed at her 'impudence' to the
extent of deciding that they would register her for
the exam so that she could walk her talk.
Knowing that GCE is not a piece of cake, the brothers
probably knew that the only way their 'brash,' and
therefore 'annoying,' little sister would eat the
humble pie was if she wrote the exam and did not do
well in it.
So when they were registering her for it and they
encountered the problem of her being ineligible for it
as she was younger than the minimum age set for
the exams, still wanting her to eat the humble pie
made them do what they shouldn't really have done:
they increased her age by five years so that the
online registration process would register her.
And they succeeded. She got registered for last
year's GCE and was listed to write it at Victoria Island
Secondary School, Lagos. If her brothers wanted to
eat the humble pie, they succeeded somewhat when
little Anjola arrived at her exam centre.
Being a little girl indeed, in both age and stature, she
stood out among her fellow candidates who attacked
her immediately, saying, "Little girl, what are you
doing here? Are you sure you are here to write the
exam?" The above are even nice comments. There
were some really rude ones.
"Overambitious girl, you are not supposed to be here.
Why don't you wait for your time? You are very
greedy," and on and on like that. Even the examiners
didn't want to allow her into the hall but only did so
because the biometric test they did proved that she
was indeed the registered candidate. Mrs Abosede
Botoku, her mother, says she expected that her
fellow candidates would harass her. "I expected that
she would be harassed so I wasn't surprised by it,"
she told Saturday Mirror.
And so Anjola wrote the GCE, but she didn't answer
all the papers, she did just two, French and English.
"I wrote just French and English because I had
teachers who tutored me in them. My father is a
former French teacher and my mother has a degree
in English so they both taught me those two
subjects." When the results were released, she made
C5 in French and C6 in English.
"I expected to make B2 or B3 in English and I'm
disappointed I did not." Saturday Mirror therefore
asked her why she didn't make the grade she
expected in English, if maybe the exam was very
difficult for her. "The exam was very easy," she
retorted. "It wasn't something that could be failed."
Hazarding a guess as to why she didn't do as well as
she expected in English, her mother said, "I believe
two things worked against her. The first is
overconfidence. I feel she was overconfident and it
affected her. In my own days too, I was very
overconfident when I wanted to write English and I
got a lower grade than I expected.
"Another thing that I believe affected her is the
harassment she encountered from her fellow
candidates. I'm sure it affected her psychologically.
The harassment was just so harsh. People would walk
up to her and say she should prove that she really
wrote the exam."
So why did little Anjola feel that she could write an
exam far advanced for her age and more suitable to
her fourteenyear- old brother, Olujuyin? "It's the way
our parents brought us up," she responded. "My
mother is a magistrate and my father a lawyer.
They insist that we must read, and when they bring
newspapers home, it's always a struggle between me
and my brothers over who would read them first."
Technology is another factor that also helped greatly
in enhancing her intellect. She has ample access to
the internet and she had got to read about the feats
of many young people in other parts of the world and
she felt she could be like them.
Such young people include the youngest professor
ever, Alia Sabur, who became a professor at 18 years,
an undergraduate at 10, and got her first degree at
14 from New York State University.
Reacting to how he feels about her remarkable feat,
her father, Olufemi Botoku, said, "It all began like a
joke between her and her brothers, but it has proven
how intelligent and hardworking she is, so I'm happy
for her."
[Source: National Mirror]
Sent From David Aniemeka
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