A Brief History of Holy Trinity College Ngbo

The credit for the establishment of Holy Trinity College, Otinyi, Umuogudu-Akpu, Ngbo, belongs entirely to Rev. Fr. Peter Omogo who conceived the idea and got the School started on September 9, 2005 with a handful of pioneer students. Establishing the school in this remote village where it is today was a task that needed more than sheer good will. More importantly, it needed a man who had the heart of a lion and the faith of Abraham to propel him to embark on such a project, believing that even impossible dreams carry with them the potentialities that can transform them into glorious realities.

Without any reasonable fund to begin with, Fr. Omogo doggedly did everything possible to get the school started and to keep it going. Holy Trinity College is a delight today because Fr. Omogo was daring enough to embark on what seemed impossible.

By the time he left the school and Holy Trinity Parish to the United States of America for further studies, its foundation had been solidly laid. The school had enough hostel accommodation for both male and female students. It had enough classroom accommodation for the entire students. It also had such .other essentials like refectory, bathroom and toilet facilities. It was registered with the Ministry of Education on July 13, 2006 and approved by the same Ministry on November 28, 2007. It was subsequently approved for Junior Secondary Certificate Examination on January 17, 2008.

Rev. Fr. Godwin Onuora who succeeded Fr. Omogo as the parish priest of Holy Trinity Parish as well as the Principal of Holy Trinity College did not stay long in the parish and in the school to enable the students tap from his own store of wisdom and hard work. Nevertheless, as I settled down in the school after I had taken over the administration of the parish and the school from him in September 2009, I was made to understand that the positive impact of his own administration was beginning to be felt by the time he was transferred from the parish and from the school.

Since the school is located in a far-away village where teachers hardly go to their duty posts, let alone teach pupils in the public primary schools, Fr. Omogo was constrained to admit anybody who presented himself or herself for admission irrespective of whether he or she passed the requisite examination or not. If he had maintained at the beginning that candidates seeking for admission had to prove that they were intelligent enough to score high marks in the entrance examination before they could be admitted, that would have in practice foreclosed the noble idea of beginning the school.

Rome was not built in a day, is a popular saying. Fr. Omogo's admission policy at the beginning of the school can be likened to the biblical parable of the wedding feast. Since the community where the school is located could not boast of a good number of qualified candidates to be admitted and since the qualified candidates who could have come from far and wide had been taken by more accessible schools in the urban areas, he offered admission to anybody who was interested in the school.

I believe that, like the king who organized his son's wedding feast, ordered his servants to go to the street and invite anybody they saw since the rightful persons who were formally invited had refused to come, Fr. Omogo would have later regularized the quality of education in Holy Trinity College if he had stayed longer by admitting only qualified candidates and by insisting that those who failed their examinations should repeat the class or go. It is the spirit of adventure and the longing to help the people which Catholic priests inherited from-the early missionaries that made Fr. Omogo to embark on the establishment of the school. The same spirit made Fr. Onuora to continue from where Fr. Omogo left the school for good. Hence, we do not hold any of them responsible for the low standard which characterized the institution at its formative stage.

the administrators of the Marist Schools had gone farther away in the village and established a secondary school at the time Fr. Omogo established Holy Trinity College, people from far and wide would have taken their most promising and most intelligent wards there because they have made a name. They did not make that name in one day. It takes time and many other factors.

Nevertheless, since no measure had been applied to brush up the less intelligent students before I took over the administration of the school, many of the deplorably dull ones, who were admitted in the hope that they would eventually be brushed-up, never improved. Their stay in the school reminded me of what one of our primary school teachers, Mr, Thomas Ogbu, used to say in the class about a particular boy who appeared to have come to the school each day without his brain. The teacher used to call him, dumpty-humpty, whatever that means! And he would add: "Wash a pig, comb a pig, a pig will always remain a pig!"

The initial challenges gave rise to other associated difficulties at the beginning of my own administration. Many students and teachers from my former school, Annunciation Secondary School, Kpirikpiri, followed me to Holy Trinity College, Ngbo, when the students from the two schools mixed up in the classrooms, a strange feeling of hostility instantly developed among them. That compounded my difficulties at the beginning.

Most of the students who followed me from Annunciation Secondary School had the singular opportunity of having been properly groomed right from the nursery school. What eventually became Annunciation Secondary-School began as a, nursery school on September 19, 1999 with 9 little children. Two out of those 9 children, Cynthia Onu and Juliet Alo, remained students of Annunciation until they sat for the Junior Secondary School Certificate examination. The other seven had left the school before then. Cynthia and Juliet were among the many students from Annunciation Secondary School that followed me to Holy Trinity College, Ngbo. In their different classes the students from Annunciation Secondary School truly proved that they had better educational foundation than the students they met in Holy Trinity College.

The old students of Holy Trinity College were so mesmerized by the performance of the new students that out of fear and admiration, the story began to circulate among them that those who followed me from Annunciation Secondary School had electric or computer brains. That they knew almost everything that could be learnt in the secondary school and so they should have gone to the university and not Holy Trinity College. What was amazing about this feeling is that some of the teachers we met in Holy Trinity College share the same view. This way of thinking inevitable; brought about a feeling of inferiority complex on the part of the old students of Holy Trinity College and superiority complex on the part of the former students of Annunciation Seconder School.

Indeed, there was open bitterness and rancour in the school. The old students of Holly Trinity College felt threatened by the presence; of the new students. They saw the latter as outsiders who had come to upset the peaceful and easy-going academic atmosphere which they had always enjoyed. As a result of the fact that the new students always communicated among themselves in English Language, they were nicknamed English People. The new students on their own part were eager to hear the old students make some blunders each time they wanted to speak English and they gave them nicknames that corresponded with their individual mistakes. For Holy Trinity College, it was indeed a period of cold war. I, as the Principal, bore the brunt of that war. The cold war soon became so intense that it translated into a big division in the school. The students did not see themselves as students of one and the same school but as Holy Trinity or Annunciation Secondary School students. All my initial efforts to convince them that there was nothing like students of Annunciation Secondary School in Holy Trinity College and that all of them were students of Holy Trinity College fell on deaf ears.

The whole thing put me in a very precarious situation. I was becoming the loser. It was not easy for me to douse the tension because most of the old students found it difficult to believe that my new policy was for their good. It was very difficult for me to convince them that it was not a matter of having electric or computer brains but that of having good and dedicated teachers and hardworking students. It was a matter of good education. But that is precisely what they were not in the mood to understand.

To redress these problems, I summoned an. emergency meeting of the PTA which took place on October 3, 2009. At the meeting. I told parents and guardians that I had no alternative than to raise the academic standard of the school. They were all delighted and told me to go ahead with whatever policy I believed would help the students achieve the desired aim. The parents unanimously accepted my proposal that we should raise the pass mark in every examination to 50 percent. Any student who scored less than 50 percent at the end of each academic year should repeat a class or leave the school in the alternative.

When this was announced to the students there was panic. If they were given the opportunity, many of them would have earnestly pleaded that I should be removed from the school because they believed that introducing such a policy would eventualy bring about closing down the school instead of building it up.

Like students, some of the teachers also felt that I had come to upset the school by brave new ideas and stringent policy. This is because when I discovered that some of them were not capable and could not really teach, coupled with the fact that they were part-time teachers, I took a decision that looked too drastic for them. I paid-off those who had not much to offer and asked those who could teach but taught on part-time basis to choose between the option of being full-time teachers or leaving the school. In the end, five teachers left the school within the first two months. It is noteworthy that five out of the existing teachers I found to be capable in all respects remained in Holy Trinity College and contribute in the transformation process. They are Mr. Theophilus Ali, Mr. Osondu Mbaba, Mr. Christian Igboke, Mr. Samuel Ebenyi and Mr. Bernard Ituma. We are are committed to building an enviable Holy Trinity College that can compete with the world out there. Rome, They say was not built in a day hence we dream that the formation process we have long started will hit beyond the skies.