Forty pieces of ceramic white tiles arranged systematically serve as a maker board for students of the St Johns Anglican Primary School, Ebute-Igbooro, an agrarian community in the Yewa North Local Government area of Ogun State.
The tiles board, divided in three sections with a green marker, reads mathematics, english studies and basic technology.
While the date written on it bears 30/09/2025, the appearance is decades behind.
The school, with about 242 learners from different surrounding villages, presently has seven classrooms, a yellow and green painted three-block on the right and an unpainted crumbling and cracked four-block classroom on the left.
We observed that the St Johns Anglican Primary School, founded in 1955 also had an uncompleted classroom and other dilapidated structures with palm roof ceilings.
Ebute-Igbooro is a 150-year-old community that sits at the border between Nigeria and Benin Republic.
Founded in 1875, the community with its residents speaking the Yoruba Ketu dialect has its major occupation as farming, while the women supplement the household income by producing fufu, garri, and engaging in other petty trades.
Despite existing for 150 years, the community’s severe neglect and the harsh effects of economic hardship are starkly evident in some of its barefoot school children, who lacked uniforms, textbooks, and even school bags.
A local, who spoke under anonymity within the St Johns Anglican school, called for the renovation of the class rooms, abandoned structures, disclosing that while they had a well, the students lacked access to portable water.
“We need drinkable water, we have a well but if we have someone who can give us boreholes and if the school can be fenced, it will be appreciated so that hoodlums won’t have access to destroying our classrooms and offices,” he said.
During a visit to yet another school in the community, it was observed that students at the Yewa North Local Government Primary School, formerly called the Egbado North primary school practice open defecation.