Chapter 6

                         Ade as Well as Jide
                       COMES vs. COME

OPEN Day was very important at Stardom Schools. For the management, it was an opportunity to update parents on academic activities. A staff meeting was held before each edition. It needed no reminder. Teachers and non-academic employees knew it was a day when they
had to look their best, especially because they had personal encounters with parents. Generally, Stardom encouraged — and sometimes compelled — its teachers to look presentable. Some had even been fired for flouting the dress code.

At the end of every academic session, the best-dressed teacher was identified and
presented with an award. The event was a promising moment for many teachers, including the principal. It proved that the reward of teachers did not have to wait until they got to heaven.
Some parents brought cash and other gifts in kind for specific members of staff,
especially class teachers. The Gbayi family was outstanding. Smart Gbayi’s mum,
Mrs Nike, would gift the school several packets of beverages. Her husband worked
in a big company that produced them. But Open Day was also dreaded by teachers
because parents often came with trailer-loads of complaints. Any teacher who had
‘offended’ any pupil, genuinely or otherwise, deliberately or inadvertently, could
receive cartons of bottled anger.
Mr Bepo recalled an episode. Mrs Ibidun Gloss had sent for him, asking him to
appear in her office urgently. With her was a parent, Mr Guta, seated in a chair in
front of the MD’s desk. Bepo greeted the duo as he walked in. However, the MD
indicated she did not need any pleasantries. “Where is Fafore, the one who calls
himself an English teacher?” she asked.
“In the staff room or the class,” the principal replied, sensing trouble.
“Wherever he is, whatever he is doing, find him! Tell him to hand over all school
items in his care and disappear from the premises! Draft his sack letter and let me
sign it within the next 30 minutes!” the MD bellowed.

Shocked, the principal looked at Mr Guta, searching for a clue. He saw none,
not in Mrs Gloss’ face either. The parent did not betray any sympathy for the teacher
about to be flung out of a job. Instead, he looked calm, reassured and pacified by the
sack order.
If there was an instruction Bepo hated, it was issuing a sack letter. He had done
so on some occasions. The management rarely sacked anyone directly. It executed
what he considered a dirty job through his office. He always felt pained when
anyone had to lose a job, especially for issues he felt were not grave. There were
times when no one could help matters, such as the case of a teacher who, the
previous term, was caught altering a student’s result for a fee. Some had been sacked
for perennial incompetence and child abuse, suspected or proven. Mr Bepo
remembered that the management, through his office, had also booted out some
who, he believed, were either not seriously guilty or not guilty at all—just hapless
victims of circumstance or even conspiracy. Whatever the offence or its magnitude,
Bepo always felt a void in his heart whenever a colleague lost his or her job. Perhaps
that was because he had experienced joblessness before. He understood what it
meant for a family man like Fafore.
What Mr Bepo considered the most embarrassing moment of his life happened
while he was out of a job. An ugly situation had forced him out of the school where
he worked. He had no savings, and no new employment was in sight. At the height
of the financial drought, he ‘ate’ the N2,500 electricity tariff he collected on behalf of
tenants in the crowded face-me-I-face-you house, where he lived in Iyana Ipaja, in
Lagos. To cover up the deed, he lied that he had remitted the cash.

But as the Hausa say, kullum ta barawo, rana daya ta mai kaya: every day is for the
thief, one day for the owner. Bepo inherited the adage from a police friend who was
from Niger State. NEPA (electricity) staff arrived and disconnected the power cable
one day. Then truth dawned on everyone. The furious tenants rained insults, curses
and mockery on Oga Tisa, as he was called. The most aggressive complainant, that
God-forsaken day, was Iya Mathew, the no-nonsense wife of Mr Adio, a co-tenant.
The short devil grabbed a whole bowl of èlùbợ, cassava powder. Since her hand could
not reach the headquarters of his skull, she jumped, rocketing her stumpy frame off
the ground, and dunked the bowl on Bepo’s head. Immediately, he became a ‘white’
man. And as though the cassava flour baptism was not enough, Iya Mathew burst
into singing:

Ọgá Tísà olè!
Ó ná owó iná
Ọgá Tísà olè!
Ó ná owó iná
(Mr Teacher is a thief!
He has spent the
electricity money!)
“Madam, what is the matter with Fafore?” the principal asked the yet-enraged
MD.
“Mr Bepo, please do what I asked you to first, then come back later with a query. Or
you kuku send the query to me electronically.”

Rather than go to his office and send for Fafore, the principal went straight to the
staff room, embodying the Igbo proverb that says mmiri oku anaghị anọ ogologo oge na ire
— a warning that hot water does not stay too long on the tongue. The English teacher
was not in the staff room, though. He was in the SSS 2 class. That meant Mr Bepo would
have to do something he very much detested: stop a lesson halfway.
“Good morning, class,” the principal greeted as he walked in. Without taking
any excuse from Mr Fafore, he addressed the students: “I need to urgently have a
word with your teacher in my office. Be responsible while he is away.” Before he
could ask, “Am I making sense?” — an expression they knew to be his trademark —
some students playfully preempted him, blurting it out in unison. Others joined in,
laughing as they chorused, “Yes!”
Fafore did not like the interruption but had to obey his boss. He thought about
handing over his note to the class prefect so that the students could copy it, while
he attended to the principal. But this was no longer allowed at Stardom. Years ago,
the management stopped it after a parent sued the school.
The parent, an accountant with an oil company, learnt that his daughter, who
was blessed with very good handwriting, was asked to write a note on the marker
board for others to copy. He had advanced counts bordering on exploitation,
cheating, oppression, and visual exploitation. His lawyers further argued that the
teacher indirectly imposed a career on the girl. They said she might be influenced to
become a teacher, whereas her parents wanted her to study Medicine. On the
allegation of visual exploitation, the parent said the teacher subjected his daughter
to corrosive eyes that might have leered at her as she stood in front of the class.
The matter was eventually settled out of court after a lot of pleas by the school.
While the student was compensated with one tuition-free term, the teacher was
suspended without pay for three months. The English teacher remembered the case;
the principal also did. Fafore thus decided to let sleeping dogs lie and even snore as
they liked.

“Mr Fafore, what issue do you have with the management?” Bepo asked
earnestly when both men got to the Principal’s Office.
“The management…? I have no problem with anyone,” Fafore answered.
“When did you get to school today?”
“7:30 a.m.”
“Did you flog any pupil?”
“No. I don’t cane students.”
“Did you have any argument with any parent or the management? Or when
actually did you get to school today?”
“Principal, why these questions? Why would I argue with anyone? You know,
I hardly come late.” Really, the principal knew Fafore rarely arrived late to school. Although he
lived far away, he planned his itinerary in such a way that he, instead, came very early. Like many other staff members, he could not afford the rent charged in the
Lekki area. A two-bedroom flat could cost more than N2,000,000, with most
landlords demanding two-year rent upfront, besides other expensive charges.
Successive governments had tried to compel landlords to charge less and offer less
stringent terms. Official declarations were made to that effect, but they were rarely
enforced or were simply unenforceable. This led some critics to believe the
authorities were not sincere. They argued that the same governments that claimed
they wanted landlords to charge lower rents were fond of slamming high prices on
their housing schemes. When a two-bedroom flat built by the government costs
about N10,000,000, how would the masses benefit from it?
Despite being a graduate for 22 years, Mr Fafore’s salary remained N175,000.
How could he afford a million naira rent per annum? How could he buy the
government’s flat, even when all he needed, as an initial payment, was a 25 per cent
deposit? Besides, residents knew there would be other hidden charges.
Fafore’s first solution to the housing challenge was to rent a one-room
apartment in Ijaye, near the boundary between Lagos and Ogun states, in the Iyana
Ipaja axis. He paid N170,000 per annum. After he got married, he moved further
away to Sango, where he rented a mini flat for N300,000 per annum. Three years
later, he purchased half a plot of land in Ifo, a little deeper into Ogun State, where
he built a two-bedroom apartment. He had barely completed the facility when he
moved in with his family. Two years later, he had yet to plaster the house and had
neither installed a bath nor a toilet. What mattered to him most was the joy that he
was no longer a tenant. He had become a landlord, a bona fide member of the
community’s landlord association. He paid rent no more. He lived no longer fearing
landlords who often behaved like land gods. The only sacrifice he made daily, to
guarantee punctuality at Stardom, was to permanently maintain shorter nights at
home. He woke up at 4:00 a.m. and set out for school at 4:30 a.m. Thus, he would
get to the premises by 6:00 a.m., rest on his table, and snooze for about an hour
before his colleagues arrived. About five teachers ran a similar schedule, living in
the Ifo, Adiyan and Ofada axes of neighbouring Ogun State. The principal was
aware of these and should not have raised any query about lateness. Fafore had,
indeed, twice won the Most Punctual Teacher Award.
“I am sorry I have to bombard you with these questions,” Bepo said, relaxing.
“But there is a problem, a major problem. The MD called me to her office. She is
furious. Livid. By the way, I wonder if you had any argument with Mr Guta, the
father of Dorah in SSS 2 and Nicholas in JSS 2.”
Fafore said he had no discussion with him, let alone an argument. “He came to
the class. He checked his son’s books and said nothing before he left. Well, it seemed
he left abruptly. Perhaps angrily too, given the way he stormed out. He did not have
any word with his son or me…”
“Definitely, there is a problem. The MD says you have to go.”
“Go? Go where?”
Fafore crashed into the sofa at the office. Sacked? How? Why? Questions raced
through his mind. His thought flashed to his home, where his wife was heavily
pregnant. He also had not finished paying his children’s school fees. He had put
them in a school near his abode in Ifo. Apart from the long distance to Lagos, he
could not afford Stardom’s fees. The management gave teachers who had been in
the school for up to seven years the concession of paying only a 50 per cent fee on
any child. Other charges remained sacrosanct—like those for books, feeding,
uniforms, etc. Yet, Fafore could not buy in. He would still have to pay up to
N250,000 for each of the children if they had to study at Stardom.
When he returned to the staff room, he found some colleagues were already
discussing his matter. He wondered how they knew. But, of course, at Stardom,
information travelled faster than light.
“Fafoo, what happened?” Mrs Ose, the Igbo Language teacher, asked.
Before he could answer, three more questions had jumped out of the mouths
of other staff.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Fafore said as he began to sort personal items on his
desk, indicating to his colleagues that the ordeal was real. The staff, visibly
unhappy, wondered what went wrong. It was a lesson to them all: there was no job
security in the establishment.
“What do you expect when you are working in a one-man business?” Audu
asked, unusually serious. “I have always said that the job we have is the type the
wind can blow away any time, any day, depending on the mood of our employer.
But I think we shouldn’t allow this matter to go on like this.”
“What would you do? What power do you have to change anything? Do you
want to fight your employer?” the Agric teacher, Mr Obi, asked. Just then, a message
came from the principal: all teachers were to congregate at the MD’s office for an
emergency meeting.

At the meeting, the still-enraged MD announced why Fafore had to quit, and
why others could soon follow suit. But no sooner did she begin to speak than she
stopped and winced, as pain fired her buttocks. She had sat down for hours during
the day. Now, her bum had started to revolt. She squirmed and readjusted her
backside on the chair. Her face reflected a mixture of two distinct troubles: Fafore’s
and her distressed bottom. Everyone who saw her, however, believed her
countenance was all about the embattled English teacher.

Armed with double-barrelled frustration, the MD declared she was fed up
with the embarrassment teachers were causing the school whenever they
demonstrated incompetence, especially in the presence of parents. “This school will
no longer tolerate incompetence,” she dropped. “We employed you because you are
professionals or, at least, you said so. Whether in Maths, Biology, Government or
English—once you show that you are raw or more illiterate than the woman from
whom you buy onions and pepper in Obalende, you have to go.”
The reference to Obalende traders stung Mr Oyelana. He found the MD’s
judgement disturbing. His wife was a graduate, but she sold frozen food in the
popular Lagos market. Was she one of the people the MD referred to as illiterate
fools? Unfortunately, the scene was too hot for Oyelana to tell Mrs Gloss that his wife
was not only educated but also that the money she made monthly was almost double
the salary the bragging Stardom paid him.

“I’m sure some of you must have learnt that Fafore, the so-called English
teacher, is leaving this school today,” the MD continued. “And I think the principal,
too, will, henceforth, have questions to answer. If you cannot monitor your teachers,
if you do not check their notes, and parents have to uncover the abomination we
ought to have eliminated internally, then you are bound for trouble. Imagine! A
supposed English teacher! This is what a parent, who labours day and night to pay
his children’s fees, found in a note Fafore gave the students…”
She collected five notebooks from the secretary, seated on her left. On the right
was the principal. She had asked the secretary to randomly gather the notebooks
from the class Fafore handled. The MD then opened a page and pointed out what
she believed was a grammatical atrocity.
“Ade as well as Jide comes early,” the MD read. She observed the staff, eager to
see shock written all over their faces. “This was what the parent, Mr Guta, saw and
he became so angry that he threatened to withdraw his children from the school.
What sort of an English teacher or any kind of a teacher would say, ‘Ade as well as
Jide comes’, instead of ‘Ade as well as Jide come’? Ladies and gentlemen, a teacher
like Fafore — alias Mr Ade-as-well-as-Jide-comes — definitely has no place in this
school,” she ruled.

“Is this the reason we are sacking the man, ma’am?” the principal asked, with
a chuckle.
“Is it not grievous enough?” the MD asked, almost gutting Bepo down with a
fiery look.
Some teachers murmured in her support or in mild protest against how Bepo
was trying to trivialise the matter. The principal’s response infuriated the MD
greatly. At once, she thought he also might not survive the scandal. “So, Bepo, ‘Ade
as well as Jide comes’ is your position too, and your estimation of what represents
the standard of this school?”
“There is nothing grievous about the statement,” Bepo said, unruffled. “There is
no error whatsoever. It is a piece of Standard English. As a matter of fact, we have
to quickly call Fafore back and update Mr Guta too. I wish they had not left. More
importantly, we have to call Fafore back. What he taught the students is correct.
When you use ‘and’, the verb that follows is ‘come’. But when you use ‘as well as’,
‘together with’, ‘alongside’ etc., we go for the singular verb with ‘s’. The clause is in
the indicative mood and does not align with normal grammar rules.”

Not impressed by the ‘blasphemy’ the principal was preaching, the MD
directed everyone to bring out their smartphones and investigate the assertion
online. Interestingly, all discovered that Fafore and the principal were right. Mr
Guta was wrong. The MD was wrong!
Silence. The MD had ranted publicly about an error that didn’t exist. She had
set in motion the sacking of a guiltless employee. She had embarrassed hardworking
Fafore. Now, she felt deflated. Some teachers felt sorry for her. Others thought she
could have been more discreet about the affair. No one knew exactly how to break
the ice. But Mr Audu was on hand to save the day.

He cleared his throat and confessed he had something “even more important”
to add to the grammatical trial. Everyone waited to hear what that could be,
especially as the English question had already been roundly resolved. “I just want
to say that Mr Fafore,” he began, picking his words heavily, “as well as the
principal,” he continued, “is correct. And the MD, Mrs Ibidun Gloss, is hereby
pardoned, discharged and acquitted.”
The room rocked with laughter. Audu had done what he knew best. He rose to
his feet, smiling mischievously, and gave the already-amused Mrs Ibidun Gloss a
Japanese bow.

“Audu, if I lay my hands on you!” she said. “Principal, give him the sack letter as soon as you collect it from my great teacher, Fafore.” The room erupted in fresh laughter.