An 18-year-old student of Lagos State University (LASU), Saheed Sunday, has emerged as the winner of the Zacchaeus Onumba Dibiaezue Memorial Libraries (ZODML) poetry contest organised for students in public tertiary institutions.
The 200-level English Language student, with the winning poem, ‘Poem About My Mother’, defeated four other finalists in a keenly contested exercise.
One of the judges, Aduke Gomez, stated that the quality of the writing was incredible without mincing words with over 791 entries received from students across tertiary institutions in the country.
“In any competition like this, there will be those who enter just for the sake of it. But we could tell by the time we had sifted and sifted until we got to the top 10. It was difficult to choose, and in fact, any of the top five shortlists would have been the best because the quality of the writing, the quality of attention to the theme, and the use of language were inspirational.
“For me, this exercise makes me optimistic about people who could sit and write those kinds of words because sometimes we can be dismissive of young people. We say they watch too much TV, they are always pressing their phones, and they play games. You do not think about the fact that they are reading. Whether they are reading physical books or whether they are reading books and poems online, you can tell by the writing that these people are readers,” Gomez said.
The chair of the board of trustees of ZODML, Ifeoma Esiri, said the philosophy of the organisation is to make tools such as books available so that anyone can teach him/herself and learn to achieve various things in life.
Esiri added that since the NGO opened in the year 2000, it has set up 54 libraries, 34 of them in different local government areas, while the remaining were planted within a correctional facility.
“We have a physical library that is limited. We wanted to capture large groups of young people and task their brains intellectually through poetry because Africa beautifully uses language, and Nigeria in particular is full of people who are that, and that is what poetry is all about,” she stated.
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