By: Ing. Yayah A. B. Conteh.

This piece is more or less addressed to those individuals who embark upon the arduous task of seeking knowledge of one kind or another, particularly in the field of education, beginning from the primary right through secondary schools to vocational and tertiary levels.

It is also not unrelated to those species of citizenry who toil it day and night to eke out a living for themselves in several other non-intellectual fields of passion, like in business ventures, hunting or blacksmithing activities, or even in some agricultural production enterprises geared towards the improvement and advancement of one’s material lot.

Depending on the range and intensity of the tremendous efforts applied by some people in various fields of endeavour, men and women can be ignited with a vision and ambition that ends up revolutionizing their entire lives in no small measure.

Whilst I attended school, there were students who were phenomenal in the pursuit of education. Most of them had hailed from non-intellectual backgrounds. They walked several miles every day to and fro from their towns and villages to their various educational establishments in search of knowledge. Lamentably, in fact, the majority of them, if not all, did not even know the values and advantages of education then.

Their priority in those days was to always work very hard in school, apply themselves wholesale to the multifarious academic disciplines to which they were subjected by their tutors, and always ensure that they top their classes at every given examination. If you had ever asked them as to why they were striking it out very hard at every given moment to excel themselves in class, they would simply respond by saying, rather confidently, that “I don’t want to be beaten in class by anyone else. I want to top my class”. And with that at the back of their minds, they would keep applying every little effort in all their academic undertakings until they emerged victorious in topping their classes.

Indirectly, as it may appear or sound to me today, little did it even dawn upon them that they were not only striving for survival but for excellence as well in shaping out a future for themselves that would go to make all the difference tomorrow between starvation and plenty.

And notwithstanding these rather torturous journeys to attain the pinnacle of their dreams and aspirations, a significant proportion of them succeeded in hitting the finished lines of their academic races by transforming themselves into people of substance in various walks of life. Hitting the finished line in itself alone is a striking example of what a man can achieve when he is obsessed with an original idea and afire with enthusiasm to accomplish it. Ironically it is the hardwork and successes of these people that have stood them taller today amongst the many others in their various places of attachment and in the country as a whole.

Imagine how it would have been like if these industrious students of old had hailed from intellectual backgrounds where their parents or guardians had constantly enlightened them about the values and advantages of education, could the sky not have been their limit?

Yes, of course, we are not blindfolded to the fact that the material lot of many others in those days, in spite of all their boundless energies and enthusiasms in the realization of their goals and aspirations, and who fell in similar categories, did not improve the least as was commonly expected. But that is where the uncertainty of the future lies, for it is only the Supreme Being that governs the destiny of mortals from the womb to the tomb.

Nevertheless, the fact of the matter remains that some effort has to be exercised by someone somewhere in anticipation of a positive turn around in the life trajectory of that individual. Afterwards a man seeking the world’s favour rather than it’s odium must have to