Winner of 2015 Mike Okonkwo National Essay Competition to students:

‘See failure as stepping stone rather than stumbling block’
Chisom Emeto, the student of Port Harcourt International School, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, who came first in this year’s Mike Okonkwo National Essay Competition for Secondary Schools, and the 12th in the series, had not been born when Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican reggae star, sang his world-famous song, “You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try; You’ll succeed at last.”
But he epitomized the truth being passed across in that song recently when he tried and tried and eventually emerged the first among six other candidates that equally performed well in the essay competition titled: “The Nigerian Political Class and the Citizens Quest for Good Governance.”
Insight provided by Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, the Chief Examiner of the essay competition shows that Emeto emerged the overall winner out of the 2,997 entries received for the 2015 competition held to mark the 70th birthday of the founder, Dr. Mike Okonkwo, the Presiding Bishop of The Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM). He showed “ability to engage the subject by showing how citizens have been culprit in entrenching bad governance,” she said in a press statement, “and then proposes what must be done to institute a political class that will deliver good governance.” An excerpt taken from his winning entry and later published on the first inner page of the programme booklet read: “For our failure to elect the right leaders, we have earned the reward of bad governance.”
To clinch the ultimate prize of  N100, 000, a laptop, a plaque, and three set of Internet-ready computers and a printer for his school, Emeto scored 73% at the first stage of the competition and 66% at the second stage. But in a chat with Education Review, it turned out that he applied the Jimmy Cliff song principle to succeed: he tried, tried, tried and tried.



Check the The Sun newspaper for the full story.