A Lagos-based editor, Bamidele Johnson, has sought pardon for the girl caught in the web of score variation in 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, Mmesoma Ejikeme.
Mmesoma came up with 362 but the Joint Admission Matriculation Board has proved that she inflated the figure.
After much argument, Mmesoma too has said she has found out she actually got 249.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Johnson wrote:
I hope the hot takes on Mmesoma, including the logic-immolating, end quickly. The young girl needs relief from merciless rinsing. There are people, I suspect, whose sole desire is to see her dumped into a scalding solution for zinc galvanizing.
But they have to camp down. She’s messed up. Industrial-scale, that is. Many of us, at 19, did utterly ridiculous things, including stuff right up there in the pantheon of behavioural mishaps. I knew, for example, exam malpractices addicts, who got second chances from family, friends and the society.
That, perhaps, was aided by the absence of anything like social media, which invite global audiences to the good, bad and downright ugly. Mmesoma, in my book, is a child, who deserves to heal from this. The distress she’ll have to cope with is massive. Even much older people, I believe, will buckle under the situation she is in.
Not sure most of those convulsing with rage over the girl would be that way if she was their daughter, niece or something of the sort. I beg una. She’s a victim. It’s obvious that some older people were providing the rhythm to which she was dancing. May land punish dem. In the meantime, let’s give her a second chance. Many of us got as many as a dozen chances.
