By: Uwem Akangson

FOR A VERY LONG TIME WE HAVE WONDERED AND MARVELLED AT THE DOWNWARD spiral in the global education system and standards. We have also been bemused and shocked at lofty and prominent positions being occupied by the least qualified people. Some ladies have used what is called in local parlance in Nigeria as “bottom power” to rise to position of prominence, but when it is time to deliver on the job, they are found wanting because their rise to such position was questionable in the first place. Some have made no apologies for their level of incompetences in this highly and lofty offices for as long as their benefactors or those still being “serviced” to retain these offices are still lurking in the corridors of power. If we look around us hard enough, we can explain the mediocrity in leadership and the wanton waste of public funds by these “superstars”. Once, a story was told in Nigeria of how a hair stylist rose to a lofty legislative office but people wondered how come she was spending the public funds in such opulence. Once, an Inspector General of Police promoted rapidly a female police officer he was dating, as reward and when he got her pregnant he said he was entitled to several wives and it was no ones business whom he dated. 

My earliest encounter with sex for grades or grades for sex would be in the nursery/primary school, where one of the teachers was frantically denying and defending himself that he never demanded sex from one of the pupils, not for any reason. Somehow, he was not believed. Back in the days, although all the children were young, there were some whose hommones may have made them grow bigger then their ages. These were the ones who felt more comfortable in company of some randy teachers in private. The smug from the teacher’s face remained for a very long time, to me as a guilty sign until he left the school and some of the girls felt like “seniors” to others for these reasons. 

We tend to hear more of grades for sex because the lecturers or teachers appear to be the predators who seem to want to coarse or force an innocent “hard working” student to have sex with him for grades, otherwise she would fail the course. While this maybe true, this allegations usually holds water when the female student is a borderline student. (While I’m not making excuses for the lectures or teachers here, I will come back to justify why the female students here need not succumb to the pressure for grades for sex, if they can pass the courses on their own). A border student is a less than average student who if “victimized” by very strict marking of scripts by the lecturer, would easily fail. 

Grades for sex is also common where the lecturer fancies a very beautiful female student and his only selling point is that he’s her lecturer and his grades would come at a price to her. This is where harassment comes into play because the female student would be hounded and pressured until she gave in. 

I once had a classmate, she was very pretty and amiable. She was the baby of the class but always friendly and jovial. There was no frowning bone on her face. She was liked by lecturers and classmates and students alike. But she was very cunning.  She didn’t have a boyfriend, as it was arguable, everyone, male, was easily her boyfriend. Still, she smiled and waved at everyone very seductively. Indeed a guy would read this as green light and would start to make advances towards her until he finds through very frustrating efforts that this was her ploy, just playing games. Some lecturers took her to task to ensure they had sex with her. Most of them failed in their bid because she outwitted them. One of the professors wasn’t going to let her off the chain that easy. This was her final year and if she failed the professor’s course as she was obviously to going to, she would not go to the Law School. At least not that year. She prided herself of being a virgin and insisted she would remain a virgin until she got married. What was striking about this story, as  remember it, was that so many other lecturers tried to help her by “cheating” for her, but she declined their assistance.  What she chose to do, instead shocked everyone. She accepted the professor’s diner invitation to an exclusive hotel to the professor’s surprise and amusement. The professor lapped it up very quickly, happy that his pressure and insistence  had paid off. Patience is a virtue he thought to himself. 

In the hotel room, the young lady bade her timing, until the professor was stack nude before she started screaming and raising alarm for help!!!. The randy professor was caught pants down. The school authorities took it very seriously and the professor lost his job in shame. Recently, again in Nigeria, a viral recorded message of yet another professor was heard demanding to give grades for sex from another female student who talked him into owning up to what he wanted, he wanted to give grades for sex and the request was unambiguous. This made the rounds and the professor again lost his job. But no prosecution for sexual harassment. 

Grades for sex, is when a lecturer or teacher promises or offers a female student that she would pass his course and he would be very lavish with his marks, if she would accept the grades and give him sex. This, in my opinion, can easily be dealt with by a very hard working studious student. She can refuse the advances of the lecturer and prepare very well for her exams. It is very unlikely that any victimization by the lecturer would be sustainable, if the female student contested the grades and called for a remark of her script by an independent lecturer. Indeed with the viral recorded message that even got CNN interested to interview the lady, it would be very difficult for any other lecturer to successfully demand to give grades for sex to thrive anymore. 

There was also a viral photograph of a lecturer who was lured and set up by a female student and her boyfriend when the lecturer persisted that he must offer grades for sex. The female student agreed and invited him over to her room and cleared the way for the lecturer, who didn’t know the female student’s boyfriend was hiding in the wardrope. When the lecturer was fully stripped, ready to offer his grades for sex, the boyfriend jumped out of the wardrope, pounced on the lecturer, invited his friends and they gave him a beating of his life, but not before his photographs were taken and splashed on social media. The school authorities also dealt with it. This confirms that business of grades for sex cannot thrive.  Perhaps it would be buying handouts for grades. 

The one we hardly hear about, indeed it goes undetected (if the lecturer or teacher keeps quiet about it), because it appears consensual and both parties are virtually in agreement on this. This is sex for grades. Sex for grades is where students (male or female) alike make passes, heat on their lecturers, try to seduce them in so many ways to give in and have sex with them in exchange for grades. A lot of girls at very early ages in school device means of getting by and passing their exams by selling sex for grades. These students wear very provocative cloths to school, hang around the lecturers’ offices and homes (especially single lectuers). The female students accept to do household chores for the lecturer and when the lecturer gives in, they have sex for grades. This is the very dangerous one, because the school system only reckons with the students’ grades to go to the next level until she’s unleashed into the society. There are a lot of female students, now graduates who walked through schools into their grades just trading sex for grades. 

This was very rampant in my schooling days, though they came across like rumors and unsubstantiated gossip, because it was consensual. We had a very difficult lecturer, difficult in the sense that he took pleasure in setting very tough exams for students’ failure. Indeed the failure rate for his courses might have been the highest and he was handling core courses. Our predecessors warned us hard enough of this ugly looking monster that smiled to bare his ugly dentition. I deviced a means to pass his exams.  I decided I was going to allocate ten solid days prior to the exams to face his course and there was no snow ball chance in hell that I would flunk the course. But I was still scared. I read so hard I looked so shabby and unkempt. I slept very few hours, as I was always in class reading. Seven days into my swotting, one of the beauties of our class, she was shaped like a Coca-Cola bottle and she knew it. She asked me to explain some of the concepts in the course to her, as they were confusing to her. I accepted the challenge, because truly those concepts were confusing to anyone, but beyond that, I also wanted to access my level of preparedness, three days to the exams. Surprisingly, she asked what I thought were four very easy questions. Well, after answering them by scratching their surfaces, I told her judging by the lecturer’s meanness we were in for very difficult subjects  in the course and not these easy questions she was asking. Her reaction was that she knew the hard ones, but the easy ones she just asked, were her problem areas. I should have smelt a rat. But I didn’t. I told her she had nothing to worry about and that she could go to bed, if truly she understood the tough concepts in the course like she claimed. 

In the examination hall, some days thence, the same exact easy four questions my classmate, Coca-Cola bottle lady had given me where the same exact four out of six questions we were expected to answer!!?? You got to be kidding me!!! The same exact way she had framed them for me, four days previous.?! I turned around to look for her in the exam hall.  This wasn’t a mere coincidence, it was purely a case of sex for grades. She just raised her shoulders back at me as if saying, well, at least I gave you a hint. I kept my ears close to the ground and the stories came filtering in afterwards. 

I heard that two revival classmates were beefing each because they both woke up in different rooms in a lecturer’s house. Unknown to both of them, they were both selling sex for grades. They were upset and annoyed at each other, that the lecturer should accept double sex for grades payment ? The lecturer had a filled night rumping from one girl to the other accepting the payment of sex for grades. The quarrel between them ran deep and no one could reconcile them. 

I also heard another interesting twist to another sex for grades. This time it was co-students who would source for examination questions by whatever means, then target a girl in class they have always wanted to lay, but couldn’t ordinarily. They would offer to show the female student the exam questions, if she would have sex with them in exchange. A particular case went sour, because the guy showed the female student the examination question alright, but had marathon sex with the female student the whole night. By twilight the female student hardly read anything, even though she was shown the examination question paper. She was too tired from the bouts of sex to have comprehended anything the whole night. 

The strategy at that point was to read as much as possible in the morning considering that they already knew which questions the entire students were going to be examined on. It was a rainy examination morning. The student who later recounted this, was innocently passing by, where the sex rabbits were reading. He made an innocent remark about the rain and that it was almost time for the exam, but their reaction was very unfriendly. He later saw both sex rabbits arguing in front of the examination hall. Subsequent information revealed that, the female student was pleading with the male student to write her examination details on his script, while she would write his on hers, so that if he failed the exams by her hand, he would be able to resist the exams successfully. The male student declined the suggestion, which was cause for the argument. 

Sometimes, it may not be sex for grades, it may just be for flirting, for sex for the fond of it or for dating. Some teachers in the United States were asked if they had ever experienced sex for grades. There were very interesting feedbacks. All the lectures confirmed one form of sexual harassment or another from a student in bid for have sex for grades. One of the teachers said her 12 year old pupil was pleading with her to suck his penis in class. She ignored him but he kept persisting. He said that there were no cameras in the office and that it was okay for her to suck his penis. When he started making effort to actually take off his trousers, to reveal his penis to the teacher, she walked out of the class room before other students came in. She reported to the school authorities, and the school insisted she pressed charges for harassment. Another student who found out that his teacher was gay started making sexual advances to his teacher. He would lift his shirt to show his teacher that he had a hole in his nipple, and in the process show off his six pack, in a bid to entice his teacher. The teacher reported that he had pity on the student because he was very weak academically and was trying to seduce him for sex for grades.

…to be continued…