Winners of Mike Okonkwo Annual Essay Get Rewards Amidst Cheers

Winners of the 2026 Bishop Mike Okonkwo National Essay Competition for Secondary Schools in Nigeria, were recently rewarded for their outstanding performance, at the 25th Mike Okonkwo Annual Lecture, to the admiration of dignitaries and guests.

The students wrote on the topic of the annual lecture, ‘Democracy at the Crossroads: Electoral Credibility, Judicial Integrity and the Future of Nigeria’.

Clinton Chimenem Agburum of Deeper Life High School, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, who emerged the overall winner, received the star prize of N800,000, a laptop, trophy and plague, while his school got a full desktop computer.

Agburum scored 72 per cent in the first round and 85 per cent in the second round, with an overall total of 79 per cent.

Alimi-Adeiga Mosorireoluwa from Holyland Senior College, Ipaja, came second with 75 per cent in the first and second rounds, with an average total of 75 per cent. She got N500,000, a laptop and plaque, while her school got a full desktop computer.

Oloruntimilehin Elijah Oladipo, from Isolo Comprehensive Senior High School, came third with 70 per cent in the first and second rounds, with an average total of 70 per cent. He got N400,000, a plaque and a tablet, while his school received a full desktop computer.

The Chief Examiner of the Mike Okonkwo National Essay Competition, Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo, said that the overall winner leap-frogged from fourth out of seventh in the first round to the first position in the second round.

According to her, students from across the country wrote with enthusiasm and sent in their entries, but only 850 essays met the technical requirement and were submitted to the panel of examiners for review.

“We report that, in general, the entries provided for us a convincing proof of how science and technology is transforming the delivery of education and the ways that students have positioned themselves to benefit from it, while awaiting the fundamental overhaul that the current curriculum requires to cope with a change.”

Noting further on the traditional curriculum, Ezeigbo stressed the need to note that it tests critical thinking learning skills by asking students to generate and document ideas on assigned subjects. And that, for instance traditional English composition training requires students to think and reproduce their thinking in words, on sheets of paper, within a given time.

She added that AI is reshaping that curriculum by doing the thinking for the students and delivering better results than the teachers’ marking guide.

Prof. Ezeigbo further revealed that more than 85 per cent of the essays that were examined in 2026, had identifiable imprints of AI or machine thinking that satisfied the frameworks of traditional assessment. “It is human in nature to follow easy path and most of the students contacted machine learning to do the thinking for them in a way that cannot be described as plagiarism.

“They are simply demonstrating agility and resourcefulness in the way they deploy the machine learning to ease what they see as difficult methodologies of the traditional curriculum.

“So, we are not just witnesses to remarkable scientific progress in learning taking place, we are also seeing how originality is being blunted by thinking machines sequel to the above discovery.”

Ezeigbo added that, “given the overwhelming percentage reported above, we decided to seek the opinion of the seven students who made it to the second round of the test about AI usage, only five turned up.”

In a more controlled environment at TREM boardroom, she said, “we asked the students to produce two foolscap pages on the topic, ‘Is AI the future or the end of education’.

“The result we got was statutory verification of what we observed in the entries and proof that the current marker of human progress lies in how learning is being outsourced to machine. It is a wake-up call for curriculum redesign, our mindset and systems must ease up to new ways of thinking about learning to remain relevant in the changing world.

Ezeigbo revealed that the winning essay acknowledged the widespread use of AI among students as aid in learning. He reported how AI is reshaping medicines, geography, entertainment and even politics in remarkable ways and pointed to how it has made life easier and made work more efficient.

“He wrote boldly that some may argue that AI makes students lazy and may impact the reading culture (negatively), ‘I am of the (contrary) opinion that smart work beats hard work’ his conclusion about machine technology in learning is very telling ‘it is not only the future of education, but the future of humanity itself’.”

She added that they have offered their individual opinion about the electoral reforms in Nigeria, “while also informing us that AI is a modern reality that must be integrated with our learning system. It is now left for us to face these truths that have come out of the mouth of babies and sucklings.”