Selimoh, Solution and the Shattered Record

B By: Folorunso Fatai Adisa

These two faces, radiant in quiet triumph, are history’s newest revolutionaries. Babatunde Olalekan Ibrahim, “Solution” to those who know him, and Lawal Selimoh Yetunde, affectionately called “Selimoh”, have accomplished what generations of us in the Department of English University of Ilorin, Nigeria could only dream of.

For forty-nine years, the department bore a strange and stubborn jinx. It was the kind of unbroken record that became folklore: no one, not a single student, had ever graduated with a first-class degree. Year after year, brilliant minds passed through its gates, some coming agonisingly close, yet the summit remained untouched. It was a tale told in staff rooms, whispered in corridors, a mountain that refused to be climbed. I couldn’t climb it too. I slipped.

I remember writing, just last year, about this curious drought, and Professor Mahfouz Adedimeji (ever the sage) remarked that it was only a matter of time before the heavens broke. “The day will come,” he said with quiet certainty. And today, that prophecy has flowered into reality.

Solution and Selimoh have not merely graduated; they have rewritten the department’s story, cracking open a door that had been sealed by time and myth. They have proved that impossibilities, like old walls, eventually crumble, not to the hammer of chance, but to the steady chiselling of discipline, vision, and grit.

Congratulations to them both. May their achievement not only be celebrated but also serve as a challenge, that the rest of us must dare, in our own fields, to break the records that have mocked us for too long.