UBA enhances university education prospect for essay competition winners

The three winners that emerged from the 1,600 entries submitted and the 12 finalists shortlisted from the UBA Foundation National Essay Competition 2014 have been awarded grants to take them through university education.
Fabelurin Fahintoluwa from Maverick College Ibadan emerged as the winner of the competition, while Obi Daniel Chukwudum from St Thomas Secondary School, Kano State was the first runner up and Sunday Kenneth Ikemsinachi from Dority International School, Abia State was the second runner up.
The winners were said to have been selected through a rigorous process, judged based on the content, expression, organisation and mechanical accuracy of their entries which were received from across the nation and even from Yobe, Gombe, Borno and Adamawa States, despite the insecurity issues in these states.
Speaking during his opening remarks at the grand finale of the competition held in the UBA head office, Lagos, Kennedy Uzoka, deputy managing director, UBA Africa said the competition is a way to give back to the communities where UBA operates and to bring back the reading and writing culture which is lacking in today’s population.
“Given the surge of modern technology today which is good but has its bad sides as well, we have embraced a way of writing which is not acceptable. There is a need to write correctly. It is as a result of this challenge that UBA has come out with a competition as this to encourage the writing culture,” he said
According to Uzoka, the competition has also gone outside Nigeria reaching other African countries such as Ghana and Senegal and UBA wants to follow up the winners to ensure the students abide by the ideals of the bank and ensure their academic excellence.
Ijeoma Aso, managing director, UBA Foundation said UBA is encouraged to sustain the competition because they have seen it emerge as a badge of honour among participating schools that see their students emerge winners and for many schools, winning the UBA National Essay Competition has become an endorsement of the quality of teaching in their schools.
She added that the increasing acceptance of the competition is what has made UBA take the competition to Ghana and Senegal this year, where winners have already emerged and step by step the bank is promoting quality education on the continent with an understanding that only a reading mind has the capacity to change the African continent for the better.
While shedding light on the competition, Aso noted that this was the fourth consecutive year of holding the national essay competition, which started in 2011 and within the period, UBA has seen more than 10,000 students attempt very engaging essays, engendering a healthy competition among senior secondary school students in Nigeria.
“We have also seen over nine winners emerge champions, winning a total of N6.75 million in educational grants to study in any African university of their choice. Through the initiative, we have donated thousands of literature books to secondary schools and held hours of mentoring sessions with students in a bid to encourage them to aspire for the higher ideals of life through reading and writing,” she added.
She therefore called on other corporate bodies to come up with more initiatives targeted at creatively engaging our students and youths in a way that improves their capacity to compete in an increasingly global world, as the task of improving human capacity in Africa cannot and should not be left to the government alone. Fabelurin Fahintoluwa, the 15-year-old winner, said that she wrote the essay in two days because the information concerning the essay came in rather late.
She disclosed that before now, she had always read books and in preparation for the essay, she read online and asked her parents questions on how to go about the essay and this better informed her of what to write.
Compensation gifts of laptops were given out to the 12 finalists.